Keep Fighting

This is the Truth Network. Welcome to If Not Forgot. Stories of hopelessness that turn to hope. Here is your host, Mike Zwick. If not for God with Mike Zwick, hope y'all are doing well today.

I am over in Winston-Salem. And I am excited to do another show. You know, this isn't something that I have to do. This is something that I get to do. This is a blessing for me, but it's also a blessing to be able to bless other people.

And so I hear a lot of people telling me nowadays, they say, you know what? They say that I just want to, I'm looking, I'm dealing with a lot of depression, I'm dealing with a lot of sadness. And what they try to do is they try to look internally. But what I do, if I ever get sad or if I ever get down, I'm always looking how I can help other people.

Well, why do you do that? Because the happiest people That I know are the people who are constantly focused on others. And as I'm looking at the word of God this morning, I'm looking at 2 Chronicles 15:2, and it says, The Lord is with you. While ye be with him, and if ye seek him, he will be found of you. It says, But if ye forsake him, he will forsake you.

It says, Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy. Break up your fallow ground, for it is time to seek the Lord till he come and rain righteousness upon you. Hosea 10:12. And so I wake up in the morning and I'm ready for the day, man. Yeah, there's times where I'm tired, there's times where there's this going on or that going on, but when I lead Wednesday in the Word every other week, I get excited.

Because you know what?

Somebody once told me, they said, Mike, they said, you can't sell a dream if you're living a nightmare. And if I wake up and if I'm miserable and if I'm down and if I'm upset and if I'm feeling sorry for myself, I don't know why anybody would want to listen to me. You know, you can't sell a dream if you're living a nightmare yourself. And the Bible says in 1 Peter 3, 15, it says, sanctify the Lord your God in your hearts. And always be ready if anybody comes to you asking for a reason for the hope that you have within you.

It says, but do it with meekness and reverence. And so I want to wake up in the day and I want to say, you know what, God, I'm excited for what you've got for me today. But at the same time, I'm also willing to help other people. And I'm willing for you to humble me. And I'm willing to be humbled in the sight of the Lord.

You know, God can use anybody, but you have to humble yourself in the sight of the Lord and say, Lord, I'm just a vessel. It's not me. I actually had a dream not too long ago. And in this dream, where I was, I was about to pray for somebody, and it was somebody that I didn't even really like. I didn't like this person.

I didn't really want to pray for them, if I'm being honest with you. But I felt led by the Lord to pray for these people, and I said, okay, I'm going to go ahead and pray for them. And what I did is, I went and I go and I went and I prayed for these people, and it was all of a sudden they didn't like me, and I didn't like them. But at the same time, I still ended up praying for these people. And so, what happened was this: I prayed for them, they got healed, and these people were coming to me and they were saying, you know, thank God we were all praising the Lord for the Lord healing somebody.

And I was praising the Lord as well. But you know what else I did? I said, thank you, Jesus. But there was one guy or one person in this group of people, and they said, no. They said, we want to thank the person who prayed for us.

And all of a sudden, I stood up and I said, no. I said, we don't thank the person. We thank God. God gets all the glory. Whenever we pray for somebody and Jesus heals somebody, Jesus gets all the glory.

Whenever we cast out a demon like the Bible says, Jesus gets all the glory. Jesus said, I am the vine and you are the branch. Without me, you can do nothing. And so I heard somebody say this weekend. They said, you know, the vine, we need the vine.

Without the vine, the whole tree would die. But if the branch. fell apart. The vine, the tree would still be okay. And so God doesn't need us.

But he enjoys partnering with us in our work. And so I've been studying revival a whole lot lately. And some of the revivals that I've seen, what all of them have done, pretty much all of the ones that I've seen that have had in common, was this: they fasted. And they prayed. When I look at the revival with uh of 1904 to 1905, the Welsh revival in Wales.

Started by a guy named Evan Roberts. The guy prayed. for 10 years of his life. That the Lord would start a revival. The guy prayed and fasted every night, and he would wake up in the middle of the night and he would be praying for a revival.

But a lot of times we don't even want to get up and go to church. A lot of times we don't even want to spend the time reading our Bibles. But you know what? I'm glad I got the opportunity to interview a pastor. His name is Barnabas.

His first name is Barnabas. And he said that when he was 16 years old, he grew up in a Hindu nation of India. And he was 16 years old. He said that there was an evangelist who was a Christian. And he came to him and he was trying to get rid of this evangelist.

And he finally just said this. He said, you know what? He said, I'm going to try to get rid of you. He said, this is what I'm going to do. He was thinking this in his head.

He said, there's a donkey over there. He said, if that donkey talks. He said, I'll become a Christian. And the guy prayed and the donkey didn't talk. And he said, All right, I'm going to give you one more chance.

He said, If the donkey comes over here and if the donkey cries and makes a bunch of noise, He said that I'm going to become a Christian. He said, all of a sudden, the guy was praying for several minutes, and the donkey came over and stood behind this guy. On two legs. stood up on two legs. And he started crying and yelling really loud.

And he said, okay, because that happened. He said, I'm going to serve the Lord Jesus Christ for the rest of my life. But the Bible says that anybody who becomes a Christian, anybody who desires to live a godly life in Christ Jesus, says they will suffer persecution. It doesn't say that they might, it says that they will.

So this guy went back home, lived with his parents. A few months later, his parents found out that he was reading the Bible. And his dad actually tried to get rid of the Bible. He says, Don't read this, it's no good. His dad caught him again.

He said, Look, he said, if I continue catching you reading this Bible, I'm going to kick you out of the house. And the guy Barnabas said this. He said, You know what? He said, I love you. I I've lived with my parents my whole life and I had my own plans for this life that I had laid out.

He said, But if that's the case, he said, I am willing to leave this house. And his dad kicked him out. And he ended up living on the streets and he found a Christian man Okay. and this Christian man who was talking to him Said, I'm going to feed you and I'm going to give you something to drink. And this guy Barnabas, who was a newly formed Christian, was living outside.

It was 1979. He didn't know. How he was going to get his next food. He didn't know how he was going to get his next drink. But he lived by faith, and he says, ever since then, in 1979, which was.

47 years ago, he said, I've been living by faith ever since. That guy right now has been living the Christian life for as long as we've been around. As long as I've been around, 47 years. And he said he's always lived by faith. He said, but it didn't stop there.

He said, shortly thereafter, there was somebody who told him about a Bible college, and he was able to. Start this Bible college, and he was able to learn the Word of God and to go and to be able to do all these great things for the Lord. He said, but it started with a decision That he was not going to follow this world. And it started with a decision. Was that he was going to follow the Lord Jesus Christ and he was going to walk by faith?

You know, the Bible says that we walk by faith, not by sight. And I think that's a good Bible verse for a lot of us. I think a lot of us like that Bible verse. But I think what a lot of us don't realize is it could cost us everything. You know, as long as we're kind of going with the flow and not going against the grain.

then people are going to like us, they're not going to have a problem with us. But as long as we live by faith, and as long as we are going against the world. You know, if you're a Christian and nobody's coming against you. That may be a problem. You know, people love it when you say, hey, God wants to bless you.

God wants to give you the life and give you life more abundantly, you're probably not going to have a lot of people come against you. But when you stand up and you say, no what? Marriage is between a man and uh uh one man and one woman. They may hate you. They may come against you.

You go out there on the streets, like that guy that we interviewed from Abolitionist Rising, T. Russell Hunter. People throw paint at him, people yell at him, people spit on him. I mean, they want to kill you. If you say, no, you, we believe that a baby is a baby from the time of conception.

And know that it's not a w yeah, a woman has the right to do what she wants with her own body, but that other body growing inside of her. She can't do what she wants with that with that body because that's murder. People will want to kill you. If you say that, yeah, you know, I believe that the Lord loves you and I believe that the Lord wants to bless you, but, you know, I'm not going to vote for somebody who's standing up for socialism. I'm not going to vote for somebody who believes that you can mutilate a young child against the parents' will like they do in California.

I'm not going to vote for somebody who's doing what they're doing in Massachusetts saying that up until the very time of the birth of a child, you can murder that child in the womb. No, I stand against that. People may want to kill you. People may have a problem with what you're saying. You know, but I'm going to stand for the Word of God.

I don't care what anybody else is doing. I'm not doing this for men. And you know, if you want to stop a revival right before it starts, don't talk about repentance. Yeah, people love talk you know, we could talk about prayer and we need to pray. But one of the first things that people talk about when it comes to a revival is public display of repentance.

You know, the pastor that we've that I know, a guy named Todd Felkel. He told a story about how he went to revival at Dallas Theological Seminary, and he said a lot of it was very dry. He said, except for one week. He said there was a guy who came in and he preached revival. And he said they started to see revival, and people were publicly confessing their sins aloud, publicly confessing their sins, publicly confessing the word of God.

And he said, all of a sudden they saw a revival. All of a sudden, they started to see the fruit of revival. There was weeping. There was anointing. People were confessing their faults about drinking alcohol and confessing their faults about adultery and fornication and stuff like that.

And that's where they saw the revival. What do you want to do if you see a revival? You got to spend time in the Word. You got to spend time in prayer. And the big thing is, you got to spend time in the secret place.

You know, another revival that a lot of us have talked about and a lot of us have heard about was the Hebrides revival that happened in the 1800s as well. I think it was the 18, the 18, no, it was 1949. I'm sorry, this was another one in this century. And there was a guy named Duncan Campbell who came to, who led the revival, but it started off with two sisters. And it was this sister named Peggy and Christine Smith.

And Peggy was 84, and Christine was 82. And they were blind, and they were ridden, and they were riddled with arthritis. But this is what happened. They said, you know what, we can't really go out there. We can't do a whole lot.

But they were tired of the lukewarmness in their church, and they began to pray every night. for months from 10 p.m. at night. Until 3 a.m. in the morning, and all of a sudden the Lord spoke.

And they told their pastor, they said, there's a pastor that we've seen. We've seen him preaching, we saw his face, but. He's not here yet. And the pastor went and he talked to a friend of his, and he said, Hey, I want you to come preach. And the guy said, I can't do it right now.

He said, But the Lord dealt with this other pastor, Duncan Campbell. And he said when he dealt with this pastor, the pastor decided to come and preach. And all of a sudden, they saw a revival. signs, wonders, all of these things that the Lord was doing. But it started with prayer.

It started with revival. It started with excitement. And a lot of times what we have to do Is we've got to be willing to pay the price. You see, in many other countries that we go into, there's people who are not able to read their Bible. It's illegal to have a Bible, much less read it.

But what these people will do, they will be willing to go through whatever they can go through, like places like North Korea, places like Iran, and they have the underground church there. And they have people who are willing to do whatever they can do to spend time with the Lord, to spend time with other believers. The Bible says in Hebrews 10:25, do not forsake the gathering of yourselves, as some of them have done, especially. As we see the day approaching, and the day of the Lord is coming, the day of the Lord. And God's Word will not return void.

You know, I heard a story recently, and it was about a guy who took his dog out, and he took his dog for a walk, and he said, Okay, he said, I'm going to throw the stick. He threw out the stick and threw it out in the water, and he said, Oh, the dog will swim to it. But instead of swimming to the stick, This dog walked on water, ran on water all the way across the lake, and came back. And the guy said, Oh my gosh, I can't believe nobody saw this. He said, I'm gonna have to get my neighbor and I'm gonna bring him with me and I'm gonna show him what this dog has done.

And so he got his neighbor, he brought the neighbor with him, and he said, Neighbor, he said, This is what the dog is doing. And he said, The dog ran across all the lake. And he came back and he said Did you see what the dog just did? And the neighbor said, Yeah, your dog can't even swim. And see, as long as we're looking at, if we're looking for the approval from other men, we're always going to be disappointed.

We're always going to be disappointed. The Bible says that the fear of man is a snare. We look to God. We look to God. God, what do you have to say about this?

Lord, what do you have to say about what I'm doing? What do you have to say about this situation right now? Is the Lord pleased with you? Is the Lord pleased with you? You know, there was a meme recently on the Babylon Bee, and it said, a pastor's pretty excited because the whole world thinks what he's saying is good.

It doesn't matter if the whole world... Is applauding your actions. What does the Lord Jesus Christ have to say about what you're doing right now? What does he say about what you're posting or what you're not posting? Are you posting stuff that is just getting men's attention and happy-go-lucky and makes everybody happy?

Are you posting something that may be controversial where people may want to kill you? You know, we heard about what just happened over in South Korea, where a lot of people believe that they stole the elections. And there's some people who don't want to speak out. against any of the evil that is going on in our world. But I have been called.

The Bible says that we are the light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it.

Sometimes I want to talk about the blessings of the Lord. I want to talk about the goodness of God. But there's sometimes we have to stand against some of the evils that are out there in the world. And for many months, even years, I would pray outside of the abortion clinic over in Greensboro.

Sometimes I would stand against and I would pray against the demonic spirits. That were being activated in that abortion clinic. And I cast them out and I prayed against them. And a lot of times it felt like I was seeing nothing. There were people who were on the other side who weren't happy to see us there.

They would make fun of us, they would say this, that, and the other. But you know what? I said, I've got the truth on my side. I'm going to stand true. I'm going to stand on the Word of God.

And I don't care if everybody else is coming against me. I'm going to stand. And we kept praying and we kept going to that abortion clinic. Groups like Love Life would go out there and they would pray outside of that outside of that abortion clinic. In March of this year, that abortion clinic su shut down.

You know, heard the story about how There is uh there is a Chinese bamboo tree. And with this Chinese bamboo tree, What they do is, you have to feed the tree, you have to water the tree, and for about the first five years. You're doing all this stuff. And nothing seems to be working. Nothing seems to be happening.

And all of a sudden the Chinese bamboo tree, after five years, will grow up to ninety feet within several weeks. But you know what? If at any time during that first five years, if you had said to yourself, you know what, I'm tired of this, I don't feel like doing it. Everything that you would have done would have been for nothing. And it's like I think a lot of times we are we're working hard.

We're praying for that lost family member. We're praying for a city. We're praying for our state. We're praying for our country. And we don't see it right now and we give up.

I wonder if there's some people out there who have prayed some big prayers and have believed for some big things, but they gave up just before they saw the blessing. I'm here to tell you today: don't quit. Keep fighting. Keep fighting the good fight of faith. My Bible says that greater is he who is within me than he who is within the world.

My Bible says in the book of Proverbs that a righteous man falls down seven times. But seven times he rises again. Are you going to quit? Right before you see the blessing, are you going to quit? Right before you, you've been praying for your nation for so long.

You've been praying for revival.

Well, you haven't seen it.

So what? Keep praying. You've been going out sharing the gospel. You've been putting the gospel right here on this. On the video, on your pictures on Facebook, on Instagram, on TikTok, on Twitter, on X, I'm sorry, wherever it is.

YouTube and you're not seeing the the fruit right now. You know what? It's funny. You may never see the fruit in this life of what you're doing. There was a guy named Stephen Grille, and he was a Quaker minister back in the 1800s.

But one day he was sitting with the Lord, and he said, Lord, I feel an unction from the Lord. I feel like you're telling me to go to this campground where they're cutting wood. A bunch of logmen are cutting wood. He said, I'm going to go there and I'm going to preach. And he took a long journey.

They didn't have cars back then. And so he took the journey out to this place where they were cutting wood, and he said, All right, I'm almost here. I'm here. Hold on, nobody's there. What do I do?

Nobody's here. I thought I came all the way out here to preach and nobody's here. He said, but he heard the word of the Lord in his heart. He said, I told you to come out here and I told you to preach.

Now preach. And he started to preach. In the middle of this room, or in the middle of the open air, and he was preaching to who he thought was nobody. And when he was done, he left, got up and left, and he went home and he says, Lord, I don't understand this. And he almost forgot about it.

But about 10 years later, he was over in Europe in London. And all of a sudden, this guy came up to him and he said, I can't believe you are the guy. He says, what do you mean? He says, 10 years ago, he said we were working at a campground, and he said, I forgot one of my tools, and I went back to the campground, and he said, I heard you preaching in this room, and I peeped in. And he said, You're preaching to nobody.

He said, But. I realized that you were actually preaching to me. You were preaching to my heart. You were preaching to my spirit, and I got right with the Lord. And if the Lord hadn't allowed that guy, Stephen Grillay, to meet this guy 10 years later, he never would have met, he never would have heard about this until he got to heaven.

The Bible says that God's word will not return void. God's word will be true. God's word is a fire. I pray that I'm baptized with the Holy Ghost and fire. I pray that I've got the fire of God on me.

John Wesley said, He said, I set myself on fire and he said that people come to watch me burn. Are you burning for the Lord? Are you on fire for the Lord? You know, when I became a Christian, I didn't remember a lot of Bible verses, but I remembered one passage, and it was this. And it was Revelation 3, verse 15 through 16.

He says, I know your works. He said that you're neither hot nor cold. He says, I'd rather you be one or the other. You know, it's interesting that the Lord says, He says, I'd rather you be one or the other. He said, I'd rather you be ice cold.

He said, but because you are lukewarm, he said, I will vomit you or I will spew you out of my mouth. I can tell you a lot of things. I want to be a lot of things. I don't want to be lukewarm. I don't want to be lukewarm.

I want to be on fire for the Lord Jesus Christ. And why do I do that? Because I have a sense of urgency. Number one, Jesus could come back very soon. I mean, we've been praying for it for a long time.

We've been talking about it for a long time. But I'm here to tell you today that Jesus Christ is returning. And if he comes, he says, when the son of Lord, when the Lord comes back, will he find faith on this earth? Will he find you going out, healing the sick, casting out demons, sharing the gospel? Are you just going to be sitting around doing nothing?

Well, you know, I can just sit around in my house and I'm not really doing a lot right now. You know, I heard about a guy who died in the year 2026, and he went up to heaven and he met the Apostle Paul. And he saw the apostle. He said, Oh my gosh, you're the apostle Paul. He said, I can't believe it.

What was it like to be around the early church? What was it like to be around all the miracles, all the stuff that happened early on? And the Apostle Paul said it was pretty good. There was a lot of good things that I saw. And all of a sudden, the Apostle Paul looked back at this guy and he says, Hold on.

He said, Are you from the year 2026? The guy said, Yes, I am. He said, What was it like to be around at a time when all you had to do was take a picture or take a video of yourself sharing the gospel, and immediately people could see it all over the world? The guy said, I don't know, I just looked at videos of cats online. We all have the opportunity.

We all have the availability. You don't have to do everything, but if you're a Christian, if you're a blood-bought believer of the Lord Jesus Christ, you can do something. We can all do something. A righteous man falls down seven times, but seven times he rises again. You're not going to quit.

You're not going to quit. I'm not going to quit. You know, I heard a story about a man who lived in the late 1800s, and he was living in Maryland, and all of a sudden there was this huge gold rush out in Colorado. And when he went out to Colorado, he took his uncle with him. His name was, I can't even think of his name, but he took his uncle with him.

His name was R.U. Darby. And so he went out and he found some gold and he covered it up and he went back home to Maryland and he started raising funds from everybody. He was so excited. He went back out to Colorado.

He bought the equipment. They started digging. They got some gold. But then they kept digging and they could find nothing. And he said, you know what, I give up.

I can't do this anymore. It's pointless. And he ended up taking his equipment and he sold his equipment to a junk dealer who was locally there in Colorado.

Well, the junk dealer was a bright man and he went and hired an engineer. And the engineer came out and he told him, This is exactly where you should dig. And there was a place where the other guy had already dug, R.U. Darby. And he said, after three feet of digging.

He found a bunch of gold and the guy made millions of dollars. Word got back to R.U. Darby that he sold his equipment and could have made all this money. And R.U. Darby didn't say, well, I guess it's just my lot in life.

I guess I'm just a loser. No. He said never again. And he became a very successful insurance salesman. Your end does not have to be like your beginning.

Your end does not have to be like your beginning. Sanctify the Lord God in your hearts. Always be willing to give an answer to anybody who asks you for a reason for the hope that you have within you. And that means sometimes you're going to have to study the Word of God, sometimes you're going to have to know how to answer objections. But when you have the Holy Spirit living inside of you, you've got all that you need.

And if you've never surrendered your life to Jesus, I want to ask you to do it right now. Just say, Dear Lord Jesus. Thank you for dying on the cross for my sins. I repent. I need to turn away from my wickedness, from my fornication, from my adultery, from my gambling, from my alcoholism, whatever it is.

For my greediness, and I surrender my life to you. I surrender all. I surrender all, Lord. And I thank you for saving me. In Jesus' name, amen.

And if you've just been saved, let me know. But also, don't keep this thing to yourself. You cannot keep this thing to yourself. When I'm, when I, you know, there were these two girls, and one of them got saved, and they were sisters. And about six months later, They brought in this preacher and the preacher came in and he shared the gospel with his second sister.

And she got saved. And the second sister went and immediately told the first sister and she said, She said, Let me tell you about this Jesus. And the first sister said, No, I already know about him. I've already been saved. And this older sister, the other sister said, she said, You mean you've known about the saving knowledge and about the goodness of God and that Jesus saves for six months, and you're just now telling them?

If you've got the good news of Jesus, if you know Jesus Christ is your personal Savior, I want to encourage you to go out there and share that good news with somebody else today. God is good, He's alive, and Jesus Christ is coming back soon. Amen and amen. This is Michael Squig, If Not for God. All right, for my YouTube channel.

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