Revival With Jason

Hey, this is Jim Graham from the Masculine Journey Podcast, where we explore a relationship instead of religion every week. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just a few seconds. Enjoy it, share it, but most of all, thank you for listening and for choosing the Truth Podcast Network. This is the Truth Network.

Welcome to If Not For God, stories of hopelessness that turn to hope. Here is your host, Mike Zwick. Hey, this is Mike Zwick from If Not For God with Mike Zwick. I've got my good friend Justin Neup back in the house. And Justin, there is a lot that is going on right now, buddy. One of the things I wanted to share about Justin, he has his TikTok, YouTube channel, and all these other channels as well that are getting millions and millions of views. I think right now, he's at 50 to 60 million views. He's got Blessing Boys on YouTube as well.

And on Instagram as well, you've gotten pretty big too. But what we're going to talk about today was revival. We've done a show before Justin where we talked about what it takes for there to be a revival. And then you wanted to talk a little bit today about what to do when the revival comes. How do we handle it?

Is that right? Yeah, I think it's a good thing to think about because a lot of times we have this goal of reaching a certain point, but we never really think about what do we do with that when that comes. So what if God answers our prayer? What if he comes with revival?

What if he awakens the hearts of people? How do we respond to that and steward that so that we don't just end right there? It's the same thing as looking at having a goal as an evangelist of leading someone to Christ. That's an amazing goal to have, but what do you do when you lead someone to Christ?

What does it look like beyond that? So I think that's what kind of sprung that question in my heart. Yeah, and we had talked about this before because Jesus told us to go throughout the whole world and to share the gospel with people. We do that. Baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

We do that. But he also talked about making disciples. So when we talk about what happens after revival, you're really big into discipleship. Yeah, the Lord really sparked my heart for that.

He really actually corrected my wife and I when we went on the mission field because we had that whole goal of just going out sporadically. We would pray for the sick and do things like that, see people healed. We would lead people to Christ as far as we understood it, and then that was our whole goal. We didn't know what to do with that after that.

We didn't think there was anything after that. And the Lord began to show us a better way or a more complete way. And that was when we read in the Scriptures, the Great Commission was not go out into all the world and just share the gospel.

That's it. It was also go out and make disciples of all nations, you know, baptizing them and teaching them what? Obedience to me. So we saw this second part that was once people become born again, once people experience things like healing, deliverance, all those beautiful things, the signs we've talked about in the past, what do we do now? Well, we enter into a discipleship relationship where we teach them how to obey Jesus, according to the Scriptures.

Well, yeah, I did a show with Pastor Steve Goode from Northside Baptist, and it was Arminianism versus Calvinism. And one of the things that we talked about was once saved, always saved. And so if you believe that, hey, if somebody is nine years old, they say a little prayer. And no matter what they do the rest of their lives, they don't have to follow Jesus. But because they said that prayer, they're saved. Well, then that would be the whole focus of your ministry is to be able to get somebody to say a prayer.

But you and I talked about this afterwards, and Dr. Michael Brown and I have talked about this. Does the Bible necessarily teach once saved, always saved? According to what I read, what I've read and what I've saw and how I interpret it, no.

I feel like it teaches the exact opposite. But I don't think, and I think the problem most people have, the hangup a lot of people have is with so many people walking away from their faith. And they'll make the argument that it was probably the case that they were never genuinely born again in the first place.

But I would agree with that. I would agree that the majority of people were never genuinely born again, and that's why they seemingly walk away. But that doesn't negate the fact that the Scripture is full of warnings to the believer of not shipwrecking the faith, not heeding to certain demonic doctrines or, you know, endless examples that will actually steer you away from Christ. You know, we have Scriptures like Hebrews chapter 6, which doesn't teach that it's not specific on if a person can walk away. It's pretty clear on that.

It's teaching on whether or not a person can come back to repentance once they've believed and walked away. So that's what I see in the Scripture. Yeah.

And so I think when you realize that Jesus talked about laying down our lives and how Jesus sacrificed everything for us, you actually, you have a lawn care business and you've taken more of your time to focus on your TikTok, your, mainly your YouTube channel and Instagram as well. But you named your lawn care business after the four seeds that Jesus was throwing out. Is that right?

Yeah, that's right. Four Soils. Kind of had a connection, too. I have four sons, you know, three of them work with me.

One is three years old, so he's not quite there yet. But this idea in Mark chapter 4 of the Four Soils has always been a tremendous—the Scripture that has had a tremendous impact on me. And that is because in the beginning of my walk, when we started to share the Gospel and evangelize, we were very disappointed, if you will, with some of the results that we saw. Not of people turning to the Gospel and responding, but people that were actually continuing, you know, to walk in that decision that they've made. So it goes back to, you know, the Sunday service at church where 100 people, 30 people, 50 people respond and pray a prayer.

You know, that's fantastic, but it's hard to celebrate that not knowing a year from now how many of those 100 people are actually walking with Christ. Now, when we began to look at that Scripture, we realized that Jesus was saying that out of His own words, about 25% of the people that even responded to His message, some of those were actually seeds that sprung up, right? And they looked like they were actually going to bear fruit, but then they were either choked out or they were, you know, heat came in from the sun, and He tells you what all those things were. But we started to realize, hey, we're not doing so bad.

Like, 25% of these people are actually going to walk this out. But the good thing about that verse and the thing that was so encouraging were the ones that actually responded, they had good soil, and they were fruitful. They weren't just fruitful with a little bit.

They were 30, 60, 100-fold fruit. Wow. And so, you know, we've talked about this at length. And one of the things that you had sent me is you sent me a joke. You believe in post-millennialism, right?

But you had sent me a joke, and it was on that page for post-millennials. And what they said was, they said, you know, there was somebody who became a Christian, and he spoke to somebody else, and I guess he was pre-Trib. And he said, you know, hey, this is great, and I see something about us making disciples.

And the guy who was pre-Trib said, oh, yeah, the great part about that is we don't have to do that anymore. But the Bible doesn't say that we don't have to make disciples. And so I believe if you're post-mill, one of the things that you guys look at is, is it Psalm 110?

Is that right? And I'm going to read that right now. It says, the Lord says to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet. The Lord will stretch out your strong scepter from Zion, saying, rule in the midst of your enemies.

Your people will volunteer freely on the day of your power. And when I see this, and when I read that, one of the things that I've talked about, especially with post-millennialism, is that you guys have a much more positive outlook on the future than others who would just say it's going to get worse and worse and worse until Jesus comes back. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. I would say, well, generally, so yeah, they call it an eschatology of optimism, is what they would call it.

You know, some people mistake that as in it's all rainbows and butterflies from here, right? And so they try to look back at world history and say, well, that's obvious. You know, it's obvious that there's a sense that the world itself is declining, like the state of our culture.

But I look back and I say that you're probably taking a look at chunks of history too small, right? So if you look at the last 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 50 years, even, it's going to look like we're on a steep decline, but it works kind of like the stock market. The stock market in 2008, if you looked from 2007 to 2009, you see this huge dip. Now, if you look from 1990 to 2020, that huge dip becomes a little blip.

You know what I'm saying? And that's what it's like in human history. I tell people, what time period would you rather live in? Right now or 1500? Right now or 1000? Right now or the first century when Christians were being burned in Nero's garden to light it up, right?

Dipped in tar and all of these things. So yes, generally the world, because of Christian influence, is gradually becoming more influenced and more fruitful based on how Christians are having an impact on the world. That does not mean that there's not going to be difficulties and trials and troubles and persecutions and all the things that Jesus promised. It just means that we have an outlook that the Great Commission will actually be fulfilled. What does that mean? All nations will be discipled.

Wow, that's incredible. And so I think one of the misnomers about either post-millennialism or even all-millennialism is that, well, it's anti-Semitic. Is that... Yeah, I mean, I never really understood that argument. From my understanding, even in the pre-Trib view, it has an outlook of eschatology where actually two-thirds of the Jewish people are actually killed in the end times. And so I guess I see where it's coming from, where it's trying to say that the church is replacing Israel. Honestly, I'm not an expert on that argument. I would just see it as more a fulfillment theology. So I would land in that ballpark. And so because you have a positive outlook, how does that affect what you do in your ministry?

It affects me greatly. I don't know, for other people, their theology doesn't affect the way that they live out, because maybe there's a disconnection or something there. But for me, when I started to see that all of these promises of Jesus are actually going to be fulfilled, probably not in my lifetime, but I'm actually going to play a part in seeing the nations of the world discipled for Christ. So to be discipled doesn't mean that they just respond to the gospel.

To be discipled means that the majority of the nations of the world are actually obedient to Christ. So I look at different parables in Matthew, the parables of the kingdom, and what they reference is a small beginning and a large ending, right? It's the seed, it's the mustard seed that grows into a tree that is large and it consumes, right?

It's the leaven that goes into the lump, and it consumes the whole bread. It's Daniel chapter 2 with the vision of the statue, right? The rock that comes in that was carved not by hands, but it comes in small, and then it grows into a mountain, consumes the whole earth. Everything Jesus talked about the kingdom was something that started off small, which it did when he came to earth, but it was something that gradually grew until it actually took completely over.

And so I look at what Jesus teaches about the kingdom of God and its advancement, and I can't fit that into a theological box that calls for things to continually get worse, and the gospel to actually, in a sense, for the mission of the church to actually fail, so Jesus has to come and rescue us out. Yeah, and one of the things that if you look at just what's in the news, when I was in college, one of the things that they told us, the professors would tell us, is they would say that if it bleeds, it leads. And an example that they gave us, they said, if a dog bites a man, that won't make it into the news. If a man bites a dog, that'll make it into the news, because it's crazy, it's wild. And so, yeah, there are things out there that are bad. Unfortunately, many of the things that are good don't get into the news. And I'm talking about Christians.

Over the past month or so, when there's been this huge Asbury revival and revival has been breaking out in different pockets all over the country, I talked to many Christians and they never even heard of it. And so, yes, there are bad things that happen in the world. Look at what's, you know, in China, there's a lot of persecution.

But what a lot of people don't know is they say that the Chinese church and the Iranian church, where there is heavy persecution, the church is growing. Yeah. Is that right? That's right.

Absolutely. You see that in many, many different aspects of church history. I mean, look at the first century, right? What was taking place when the explosion, you know, of Pentecost happened? You know, when Paul was coming in and, you know, in Acts chapter 8, chapter 9, and he was persecuting the church.

What was the result of that? The result of that was actually that the people left Jerusalem. Jesus, when he came in, in Acts chapter 1, he said, you will go where, right?

You know, Jerusalem, Samaria, you know, onto the ends of the earth. So he wanted them to go out with the gospel, but what did they do? They stayed.

They stayed in Jerusalem. So persecution comes. Whoever brought on that persecution, you know, whatever, however you want to look at that.

But what was the result of it? When the persecution broke out, all the people, actually the apostles stayed, which was interesting. The sent ones stayed, and the regular people, the disciples of Christ, went out. And all of the sudden, organically, communities of faith started to pop up, so much so that they had to send the apostles to begin to recognize the work.

They're like, whoa, what's going on here? So these churches were not birthed out of, you know, these apostolic workers or somebody with some kind of professional degree or something like this. These were average people that have experienced something in Jerusalem, right? And they went out, and they began to share that. They began to share the gospel, and then communities of faith were birthed.

I mean, that goes exactly to what we wanted to talk about. What is the response to revival? Well, I would consider what happened at the day of Pentecost a revival. People were brought to life. A lot of these people were Jewish, so they were already believers in God, correct? A lot of them, you know, when we talk about the people that were coming for Pentecost, there wasn't Gentiles coming to celebrate, you know, this thing. And so they were actually revived. They recognized in their heart that they had actually come against the Messiah, the one who God had sent. They repented, and then all of a sudden we've got, you know, people being born again, people being full of the Holy Spirit, you know, what if they just stopped there and were like, man, this was fantastic! Like, this is—we did it! We did it! You know?

But they didn't. They began to cultivate an environment that facilitated the Holy Spirit to continue to move, and they said, what do we do with this? We allow it to continue to spread. We train people to go out and make disciples. People are meeting in their homes. They're experiencing God. They're being equipped, and they're trained, and they're going out to spread this thing, because ultimately, that's what the Great Commission is. Well, and you talked about people meeting in their homes, because for many years now, the church, and especially in America, church membership has kind of declined.

And then in 2020, COVID happened. And so a lot of people who were meeting in the church, suddenly they no longer went to church, and they're watching stuff online. But what you've kind of seen in your own community is you've got your own community, which in a sense is a church, but it's not in a big steeple and in a building.

Can you tell us about that? Sure, yes. The difference between, you know, an organization and an organic movement. So I believe that everything Jesus spoke about when He referred to the church, He used—the symbols that He used were either He used stuff like farming, you know, which was organic growth, right?

You plant the seeds, you water, you do stuff, but you don't actually make the growth. And He used family language, right? The family of God. So He talked about family relationships.

Even when Paul talks about Timothy, He calls him his son. And so there's this relational aspect to the way the church was meant to function. And so that goes back to the design of the family. Do you think that God designed the organic unit of the family, father, mother, children, the way that they're raised in this environment, trained up? And what happens with your children when they grow up to maturity? Do you try to keep them and continue just to add in, add in, add in, and they stay under your authority and your protection and all that?

No, to be successful as a parent is to send them out to start their own family. A few years ago, the Lord started to show us that. He started to make the connection. He's like, Justin, you know, there were not necessarily seminaries in the first century for people to go and be trained on, you know, ecclesiology and missiology and all of those things. But you could look at the family unit and how God designed that and say, this was the way that the church was meant to function. So relationships, they actually shift and they change as people mature in Christ. Somebody that you lead to Christ and you begin discipling, that is maybe an immature Christian, once they raise up to maturity, your relationship and dynamic with that person is going to change.

Now you're going to, you're hopefully going to send them out. So then they will begin to make their own disciples, teaching people to be obedient to Christ. And now this is where you see, not just addition to the church, one person comes this week, another person, you see exponential growth, because now if you put 10 people out, they train 10 people, they train 10 people, all of a sudden within a generation, you've got tens of thousands of missionaries you've sent out. So the problem is, is that the majority of the church is not actually active in their faith, making disciples. Only a small one to 2% of the church is actually, you know, the leadership is actually doing most of the work.

And I think that's why we're not seeing the exponential growth that we saw in the early church. Wow. And you actually just read a book on the, what is it, the home church group? Or what did you learn? I learned a lot, you know, what I learned most was a lot of it was just so affirming that what we're experiencing, we're not alone in.

So other people are also experiencing this. And this fellow, I can't release a lot about the book because the book's not out, so he sent me the manuscript to go over, right? And so, but it's a very powerful book because what he does that I think is different from many other books on the topic is he not only discusses biblical grounds for the modern house church movement, the organic church movement, but he takes you into their life over the last, say 15 years, and begins to give you practicals on how they walk out specific things. And I think this is not something that is discussed in the church. So when you're meeting in a home setting, you say, you know, people will compare a house church to like a small group or something like that.

They're two very different things, right? Okay. You know, as where a house church meeting is something that is more autonomous, it may be connected to a larger network of house churches, but one thing that Neil Cole, love Neil Cole, he's an author, organic church planner, and stuff like that, says is he says, you know, he talks about the DNA of the church.

I know I'm hopping all over the place here, but there's just so many thoughts on this topic. He says, you know, every church needs a good DNA. D standing for divine truth, right?

Okay. N standing for nurturing relationships. I think the church recognized that, and that's why we implemented small groups, so we want to bring nurturing relationships into the church, and we couldn't do that in a large setting.

So that's a good thing, right? But what does the A stand for? The A stands for apostolic mission.

That's the thing that really separates a small group from an autonomous house church is because they're going to carry that apostolic mission. They want to multiply, right? And so we're lacking in that multiplication aspect. But let me ask you this. How do you get a watermelon from a seedless watermelon? How's that?

You can't. Once we modify, we've modified the DNA of some of these fruits, right? Sure. Sure. They taste good.

They look good. Yeah. They don't multiply. Yeah. That's what's happened to the church. We've altered the DNA of the church, saying, we're going to do all the stuff. The leaders are going to do all the stuff. You come in, we'll teach you, but we're not going to teach you to multiply on your own. You're going to become dependent on us, and all the fruit that you see, you're going to bring to us, and we're going to continue to build our ministry.

I'm not saying every church functions like this, but a majority of them do. And I think it's really hindering what I said, that exponential growth. It looks really good.

Seedless watermelon is delicious, but you just can't produce more watermelon with it. Wow. And you guys are certainly producing a lot of fruit. Now with your video ministry, you're not able to get involved in as many small groups as you once were, but because you've taught other people, because you've given them the plan, they're now able to go out and do it themselves. Is that right?

That's right. That was probably the hardest part for us to work through, because in your head, you want to... Here's the number one sign that churches, we're lacking in large at the idea of discipleship. It's when we need leadership, we recruit, like a business.

But in the New Testament, what you saw is that people were raised up within the local community to then go out as leaders. This takes time. It takes a lot of time and a lot of work with people. And so you've got to be willing to put in that work. And that's something that we've been really, really focused on. We saw in the beginning, five years ago, a really big influx of new people, new believers, people that wanted to meet, people that were being baptized and giving their lives to Christ. Okay, now what comes after that?

The response, right? Discipleship, doing the hard stuff, working through issues, families that have difficulties with kids and marriages and all these problems. But what we're working towards and shepherding those people is to train them up so they can get to a stable enough place to where now they are equipped to help other people do the same.

You see, because if we don't do that, then all we do is create a movement or a ministry that makes people dependent on us. And that's not what we want to do, because it will only go as far as we can handle, right? We want something that's going to be exponential to where it's like pushing a car down a hill. When you begin to push that car, it's really difficult to push it from stop, right? But once that thing starts going downhill, you can jump in front of that car all you want. You can't stop it. That's what I want to see.

I want to see a movement that is truly a move of God, and how you know it's truly a move of God is because you couldn't stop it if you tried. Yeah, yeah. I mean, one of the things that I've thought about, and I'm reminded of the story, there was a police officer and they found out that the police officer was dyslexic.

Do you know how? He was handing out IUDs. The thing is, you know, with that story, you know, the police officer was working really hard. He was handing out these IUDs, but he didn't realize that if he just made some slight adjustments, he could have been doing what he was supposed to do. And so, you know, I heard a story years ago. There was a football player in the Rose Bowl game, and it was for Georgia Tech, and he picked up the ball. He started running as hard as he could, as fast as he could, but he was running in the wrong direction.

And so, finally, the quarterback tackled this guy on the one-yard line, and for the rest of his life, he was given the name wrong way, whatever his name was. And so, I think that if we're going, it's good that we're on fire for Jesus Christ. It's good that we want to share the gospel, but what I hear you saying, Justin, is that we have to have a plan. That's right. And some of that takes study. Is that right?

It does. Have you studied? Just a little bit. Oh, it lights me on fire. So, that's what I'm doing. I'm actually going through a lot of older materials that really spark this interest in me. Things like, you know, books and resources on discipleship-making movements.

That's what really kind of grasps my heart. And I noticed that a lot of the books, things like Tea for Tea, or if you've ever heard of any of these DMM books that talk about, you know, rapid multiplying movements, house church movements, all that stuff, all that material. Because I think, you know, some of these guys have done it for 15, 20, 25 years. I want to read that, because I don't want to make the same mistakes.

You know, I don't want to be prideful in the sense of thinking that, you know, I can figure all this out on my own. No, I want to learn from these guys, and I don't want to move forward from that. So yes, I study, obviously, the scripture, the book of Acts is great, to see how the church functioned, and things like that. And then to read a lot of the material of these guys that have pioneered the way for people like us, that we can learn from, and hopefully grow from, and move forward, and then our children and the next generation can build on that. And hopefully we can see, again, our goal is to disciple the nations. We're thinking big. I'm not thinking like, you know, can I plant 50 churches in Alamance County where I live? You know, I'm thinking, how can we disciple the nations?

And you've got to think multigenerational for that. Yeah, and one of the things that you told me, and we were talking about this on the way over here, and we're going to talk about this on the next show, where we talk about cessationism versus continuationism. But we were talking about how there's a thorn in the flesh, and that's what we talked about this morning at Wednesday in the Word. But what I heard you saying before was sometimes persecution, in that sense, it was actually—what would you say it is?

How could it be a benefit? Yeah, so I mean, in that reference, Paul, I just look at the context of that scripture. You know, the whole chapter before was obviously talking about these people that were coming in, these uber or super apostles that were coming in and destroying his work right behind him, right? When I look at what, you know, Jesus won't take away, it's got to be something that he's previously promised we would experience. And if you look at Timothy or a multitude of other scriptures, Jesus says, for those who seek to live a godly life, they will experience what? Persecution. Persecution, right? It's not something you can—you can't necessarily pray away persecution, because it's something Jesus promised. How does that help us? Well, I mean, in Paul's sense, it helped him remain humble, but I think it keeps us in a dependency towards God, and we need that, especially when we're going out, because we might accidentally think that the fruit we're seeing is because of us. And when we have that resistance and those people coming against us, that really stops us from becoming prideful and allows us to actually turn to God and say, Lord, I can't do this without you. Like, this is—you know what I'm saying? It's just something that is literally like a thorn in your flesh, and it won't stop. And then you've got to depend on him, you've got to depend on his grace to continue to not only defend you, right, to these people that are slandering your name and your character, but to continue to work the fruit and the transformation and the people of, you know, the lives that you're ministering to. Well, Justin Neup, and it's K-N-O-O-P. I see your wife is calling you, so I'm going to let you get that, but I appreciate you coming on, and guys, stay tuned for the next show. We're going to be discussing, are the gifts still for today, if not for God? All right, for my YouTube channel, if not for God with Mike Zwick, just like, subscribe, and hit that notification bell, so you'll be alerted when we have our next video. This is the Truth Network.