August 18, 2024 • 29 mins
Ep. 048 A Hunger for Holiness
Text: Jeremiah 7: 16-20 & Jeremiah 18: 1-11
The Lasting Legacy of Simeon Nsibambi
- Higher Life
- Revival Fires
- Enduring Legacies
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PHSA Church (Potter's House Salmon Arm)
#201 231 Trans Canada Hwy.
Salmon Arm, BC, Canada
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to the Potter's House Salmon Arm podcast. We are a Bible-Believing Church located
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in beautiful British Columbia, Canada. We are proudly part of the Christian Fellowship
Ministries with 3,000 churches around the world. We are a church focused on world evangelism,
discipleship and church planting. Here we will share recent sermons from P.H.S.A. Church
and other sermons from throughout our fellowship. I am Pastor David Bigford and I will be your
host for this podcast. I thank you for listening today and we hope these messages are a blessing
(00:36):
to you and bring you closer to God.
Hello, welcome back to the podcast. My name is David Bigford. I'm the pastor here in
Salmon Arm and I just want to thank you again for coming back to another podcast episode.
(00:57):
This is a message I put together called A Hunger for Holiness. I preached this way back
in April and the subheading of this message is, Arise and Go Down to the Potter's House.
So you can kind of guess where scripture is coming from today. If you're going to follow
along our text is Jeremiah 7 verses 16-20 and Jeremiah 18-11. So in kind of highlighting
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the idea of this message, A Hunger for Holiness, I just also want to point out that this is
something we desperately need in our time today. We really need to focus in on who you're
going to be, who you want to be in the Lord or if you're not saved at this point you need
it. Of course get saved but you need to think about what is your legacy going to look like?
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What are people going to think of you when your time is done here on earth? It's something
that is of real validity in our day and age as things are going crazier and crazier and
seem to be spinning out of control. What kind of person, what kind of being, what kind of
man or woman are you going to decide to be? So let's look at this illustration I found
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called The Lasting Legacy of Simon Nisambi. East Africa's second generation Christians
were facing the age-old spiritual problem of dullness of heart, something that we all
battle with in our societies today. Simon, I'm going to just say Simon but it could be
Simon Nisambi's message of victorious life sparked a revival that continues to this day.
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His dream was to study abroad so he applied for scholarships, finished filling out the
form and placed the envelope carefully into the mail and with the posting of that letter
in ways he could not imagine he was about to become the leading figure in the East African
or East Africa revival, a 40-year awakening that changed the spiritual map of Eastern
Africa. Simon Nisambi was born in Uganda in 1897 and while Simbe Kamonji, a chief of Uganda's
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most dominant tribe, the Buganda, had received his formal schooling at Mengo High School
in King's College, Budo, during World War I he joined the African Native Medical Corps
and was decorated for his distinguished service. After the war in 1920 he was made chief health
officer in the Bugandans King's government. He excelled as an athlete in both football
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and wrestling and as a singer and an artist but it was his natural leadership abilities
that would loom largest in his future. Nisambi became a Christian in 1922, three years before
his marriage to Eva Bakaluba with whom he would have 12 children but education, the
one thing necessary to cement his status as Uganda's elite, seemed to occupy this young
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rising star more than the gospel. Studying abroad in his mind was essential. The reply
to his application finally came and he was turned down. His best hope for advancement
had been dashed. Deeply frustrated Nisambi turned to God for answers and a vision came
to him. God spoke to him and asked him a troubling question. What value did a scholarship to
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study abroad have compared with what he already had been given? The pearl of great price,
the gospel of salvation, Nisambi was disturbed by his vision. Ashamed and repentant, Nisambi
began to preach on a tree-studded Narembi hill overlooking the busy center of Kampala,
Uganda's capital. On the street corner near the great Anglican Cathedral of St. Paul,
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the apostle, with its rounded dome he proclaimed the themes of brokenness and renewal. With
those sermons in the streets, the first leaves of revival began to stir.
Let's look at our text to Jeremiah 7, 16-20. As for you, do not pray for this people or
lift up a cry or prayer for them, and do not intercede with me, for I will not hear you.
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Do you not see what they are doing in the cities of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem?
The children gather wood in Father's kindle fire and woman-kneed dough to make cakes for
the Queen of Heaven, and they pour out drink offerings to other gods and provoke me to anger.
Is it I whom they provoke, declares the Lord? Is it not themselves to their own shame? Therefore
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thus says the Lord God, behold my anger and my wrath will be poured out on this place,
upon man and beast, and upon the trees and the field and the fruit of the ground. It will be
burned and not quenched. Let's jump over now to Jeremiah 18, 1-11. The word came to Jeremiah
from the Lord, Arise and go down to the potter's house. And there I will let you hear my words.
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So I went down to the potter's house, and there he was working at his wheel. And the vessel he was
making of clay was spoiled in the potter's hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed
good to the potter to do. Then the word of the Lord came to me, O house of Israel, can I not do
with you as the potter has done, declares the Lord? Behold, like the clay in the potter's hand, so are
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you in my hand, O house of Israel. If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that
I will pluck it up and break down and destroy it, and if that nation concerning which I have spoken
turns away from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to it. And if at
any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will build and plant it, and if it does
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evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will relent of the good that I intended to do it.
Now therefore say to the men of Judah and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, thus says the Lord,
behold I am shaping disaster against you, devising a plan against you. Return everyone from his evil
way, and amend your ways and your deeds. Let's pray, dear Lord, I pray that you would open our
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ears to your word, open our hearts to your word, that we would understand that you call to us,
that you desperately want to pull us out of the sin and the mire that we have created in our own
lives, that you desperately want us to turn to you for every good thing. But also Lord, let us
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understand that it is you who is the potter, and that you can take the clay being molded
and rework it as you see fit. So Lord, let us allow ourselves to be pliable in your hands,
to be created into what you desire for us to be, and help us to serve you in Jesus' mighty name.
Amen. So as our society today, we have placed a lot of importance on the prestige of education,
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the talent of the rock star, the pop star, and the beauty of the model, or the charisma of the
political leader. And do not misunderstand me, I don't begrudge education. You know, I've been,
you know, I was able to use my GI Bill, my military funding to get both a bachelor's and
a master's degree. So I'm not against the idea of education. But what you have to understand
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is just like in our story about Simon Nassambe, we see that in Africa, there was a belief that
studying abroad was the next step of achieving prestige and success. And in our society today,
there is a perception that if you are ever going to be successful, you have to do these things.
The vision that he received was that it is God that can lift up the lowly and can cast down the
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proud. In our two texts, we see two different pictures. The first is a picture of what happens
when the judicial hardness of a people can lead to a spiritual death that can leave no room for
intercessory prayer. Jeremiah was told not to pray for such a rebellious nation that had turned
their back on God and willfully worshiped other gods. This willful spiritual death can cause whole
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societies to look to earthly things to fill the void that is left when God is excluded. It is
important to keep this in mind that Judah had just seen Israel destroyed, but they were still
unwilling to turn back to their Lord God. We see this as the time I'm recording this, the
Democratic National Convention is about to start tomorrow in Chicago in the United States.
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And one of the many things they're doing in celebration of the DNC, the Democratic National
Convention, is that they're going to offer free vasectomies and abortions for the attendees who
are coming to this event. They are clearly putting something above God in their worship of their
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humanistic ideals. So I don't want to get into the weeds in this, but you have to understand
that there's almost a nature of sacrifice to what they're doing. They are quite literally
sacrificing to the God of themselves by having that stationed as part of what they offer within
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their party. And what a large chunk of Americans have decided is the right way to live their life
in service of self. It's a very stark contrast to what our God tells us to do and how our God
tells us to live in service to others. The second picture is a picture of the Potter's House. We
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have taken this name as a church for a specific reason. This is the parable or story that comes
straight from God through the prophet Jeremiah. It tells us that we can never assume to fully
understand God's control in our lives and the lives of the nations of the earth, because we're
all just clay in the hands of the Father. So when you come down to the Potter's House,
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one of our fellowship churches, you have to expect that God is going to challenge you.
God is going to put his hands on you and he is going to want to mold you. And you're going to
have to decide if that's something you're going to allow to do, or if you're going to go off into the
rest of the world and basically you have snubbed God's desire to work with you and on you to go
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and do your own thing. So this brings me to my first point, which is the higher life. For African
Christians like Nisambi, however, the greatest challenge to faith did not come from the
missionary imperialism, witchcraft, or ancestral spirits. So we're jumping back into this story.
For a growing number of the second generation African converts in the 1930s and 40s, the main
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issue was spiritual dullness. They confessed a Lord who rose from the dead, yet many felt
rigor mortis rather than resurrection power was the normative experience in their churches and
their souls. This is something we feel in our society today oftentimes. We'll pray with someone,
we'll see them get saved, but it doesn't last, it doesn't stick before they just kind of go
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off back into their own lives, no longer wanting to pursue or push into the things of God.
It is a battle that we deal with as a church and as a culture, as a people, because so much of our
society is about self that it's so easy for people even as they come in and get saved,
but then they'll walk away and walk away from their salvation altogether sometimes.
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So after his scholarship crisis and God's call to preach, Nisambi still struggled with an inner
emptiness of a soul. He longed to know the power of the divine will and full experience of divine
grace, and help came in the form of a white stranger. J.E. Church, Joe, to his friends, was a
new medical missionary with the Rwandan Mission, an offshoot of the Church Missionary Society
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working in Gahani, or Henni, Gahani Hospital in Rwanda. Like many who had worked with the Rwanda
Mission, Church was an Anglican deeply affected by the higher life teaching of British Keswick
revival, the openly critical of the spiritual state of the church in Uganda and Rwanda.
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Keswick's teaching had its root in the 1875 Dwight L. Moody revival in England. It taught the
power of indwelling, the indwelling sin in a believer can be broken by a strong faith
experience in which the believer both internalizes the death of Christ and surrenders to the control
of the Holy Spirit. This faith experience it taught took place after conversion. After this
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experience, the believer enjoyed victorious Christian living. Without it, the believer lived
in defeat as a carnal Christian. To tie our first text, Jeremiah 7, 16-20, together with this idea
of a higher life, I think it's important to understand and look at 1 John 5, 16-18.
If anyone sees his brother committing a sin, not only does he commit a sin, but he also
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commits a sin against the Church, and he is a Christian. He is a Christian, and he is a
Christian. If anyone sees his brother committing a sin, not leading to death, he shall ask,
and God will give him life. To those who commit sins that do not lead to death, there is a sin
that leads to death. I do not say that one should pray for that. All wrongdoing is sin, but there is
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sin that does not lead to death. We know that everyone who has been born of God does not keep
on sinning, but he who is born of God protects him, and the evil one does not touch him. The
idea here is that there are times when we can pray for our brothers and sisters with intercessory
prayer, because there is a chance for them to turn from their sin that doesn't lead to death. These
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will be the times when we are praying for repentance, sanctification, wisdom, understanding,
or spiritual revival. Other sins lead to death, like apostasy, or when someone is blaspheming the
Holy Spirit. These sins often lead to the hardness of heart that we see with the people of Judah
during the time of Jeremiah. In these situations, we often will lament for those people and nations,
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but we know that they are often too hardened to hear God's word and turn from their folly. They
become deaf to their own conviction, to the spirit of conviction that would work on them.
It's an important thing for us to remember as a church as we seek to preach a gospel of repentance,
salvation, and restoration. We must not allow this fallen world and the politics in this world to
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distract us from living a higher life in Christ. This brings me to my next point, revival fires,
and as we jump back into the story, I just want to make sure that I impress upon you that we are
also living in a time and an age where decisions have to be made. Are you going to willfully walk
down the road of self-satisfaction and hope that as you go through those dark alleys,
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seeking out the things that are going to make you happy for a moment, are they going to lead you to
a paradise, or are they going to lead you to a bondage in sin, bondage in drug use, bondage in
all sorts of wickedness, or are you going to purpose yourself to walk a narrow path? These are
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all decisions we have to make and we often have to make them daily. We daily have to pick up our
cross, the Bible tells us, because it's not something that's easily done. And I preached on
this earlier today when I was doing today's sermon because it's a Sunday, but I was reading a book
called Do Hard Things and I just interject with that. We're meant to do hard things in our
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Christian walk. We don't get to get away from doing just the easy things because the easy things
will oftentimes leave you idle enough to just fall into more self-pleasure. And that leads you to the
pride of self and to be able to fall because of your own pride. So in 1929, finding himself in a
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state of acute spiritual dryness, church took some time off in Kampala and that's where he
encountered Nisambi. Church wrote in his diary of the meeting with Nisambi that would change his
missionary career. Yesterday, a rich Muganda in government service rushed up to me at Nurembi and
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said that he had heard me speaking about surrendering all and coming out for Jesus. He said he had done
so and had great joy in the Lord and he had wanted to see me ever since. And then he said in his own
words that he knew something was missing in the Ugandan church and in himself. What was it? Then I
had the great joy of telling him about the filling of the spirit and the victorious life. Following
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this conversion, Nisambi met with the church again to go over the Schofield notes on filling of the
spirit and prayed to quit all sin and faith. After several days of prayer and Bible study with
Nisambi, church returned to Gahani Hospital and the power of Pentecost. The change in Nisambi
was visible and permanent. He quit his job as a public health worker and devoted himself full time
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to preaching and renewal. When church returned to Kampala several months later, he was confronted
by an irate missionary who demanded, what have you done to Nisambi? Church inquired what the
problem was and she replied, oh, he's gone mad and is going around everywhere asking people if they
are saved. He just left my gardener. She insisted Africans are not ready for this new teaching about
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sanctification and the Holy Spirit. So revival comes when we turn to God and acknowledge our need
for him in our life. In the second text of the morning, we recount the potter and the clay from
Jeremiah 18 and in this piece of scripture, we're shown an eternal truth. God, our creator, has the
right to reform us if we are marred. This can only happen if we allow ourselves to be molded by the
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father. Christianity is all about growth and rebirth and this continuous process that enables
the church to grow and start afresh. So Nisambi was radically set on fire for God with an
infilling of the Holy Spirit. And this is something that often happens is when people see this, even
when they're culturally Christian, they see someone really on fire for God, they recoil because
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I believe that it brings a spirit of conviction on their own lives. But the reality is that he had
stepped into the challenge to do more for God and instead of recoiling saying that's not and I'm not
ready for that, he said I'm all in. I'm all in. And this tremendous infilling comes into his life.
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So we can think of this stuff in another way. When tending a fire, you have to turn the logs over to
allow for more air to come in and stoke the fire. The embers are still hot but left unattended, the
fire begins to cool. When the log in the fire, when the logs in the fire are now just embers,
you have to add more fuel to that fire. This is a picture of growth of the church. We need not only
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to stoke the fire that is in us but also rekindle the fire in those around us and throw more logs
onto the fire. This is how revival can start and be sustained. So God as a soul sovereign has the
absolute right to deal with nations according to their conduct towards him, illustrated in a tangible
form by that molding of the potter and the vessels from clay. So when we think of going down to the
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potter's house, the idea of that is you're leaving from your high places where the temple would have
stood, maybe you're high and mighty in your spirit and you're coming down to where God is
and where God is going to work on you in the potter's house or where Jeremiah exercised his
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prophetic office low to the ground where some well-known potter had his workshop.
The idea of God as the potter is continued into Romans, in Romans 9, 2021,
it says, but who are you, O man, to answer back to God? What does molded say to its molder? Why
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have you made me like this? Has the potter no right over the clay to make out the same lump,
one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? And this is something that's
important to our day and age where in our desire to control everything and in our desire to please
ourselves, we can say, I was made wrong, so I'm just making myself into my own new image.
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And it's very similar to this verse of scripture where it's basically saying,
I have the right to change myself, but God does not have the right to change me
when he's the potter, when he's the one that made you to begin with.
Springs me to my final point, which is enduring legacies.
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Nisambi's preaching at the revival meetings emphasized two themes. The first theme was
echoed in the often repeated phrase, akibi kibi neo, sin is sin. The ugliness and
destructiveness of sin was so clear to him, but of equal emphasis was the softly spoken akisa,
lugandan for mercy. We must always stand against the sin of the world, but it is always with the
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intent to see mercy to be done. We cry out for all people to turn from their sins and accept Christ
through repentance. We cannot lose sight of the grace that holds us all together. So during the
1950s, the revival reached its peak. The Nagenda and church traveled to India,
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America, Europe, Brazil, and all over Africa with the message of brokenness before the cross.
Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya remained the epicenters of the renewal. Church writes that
the leaders of the Christian work and visitors to Kampala would not leave without a visit to Nisambi.
They would also return home with a new challenge and blessing. It's funny how challenges and
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blessings seem to come hand in hand within the scripture. Upon his death in 1978, Nisambi was
the patriarch of a movement that had altered East Africa Christianity. Millions of Christians had
been touched by the revival representing a new vital Christianity shaped by African leadership.
Still, there were many issues left in the African churches. Disagreements and doctrine led many
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splits within the church and this should be expected because God is constantly molding and
remolding us. Even within the church, there is sin and it has to be dealt with from time to time.
It is dealt with by the breaking down and the starting over and that does not mean that this
process is not intentional or necessary. It is a process that is not intended to be done
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or necessary. God is at work in the church just as he was at work in our lives and each of our
lives individually. Though many traditional denominations represented these new structures
of renewal, they prepared Tanzania for the wave of Western Pentecostal missions that came in the
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1970s and 80s. The Pentecostal preachers began new church revivals to the older churches and once
again the struggle between the faith of the older generation and of the saints in the new winds of
the spirit dominated the landscape of the Christian East Africa. Simon de Sambi would have felt right
at home. The decades-long tale of Simon de Sambi is a story of preparation, birth, death, renewal,
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and preparation again. God's work is never done and that is the primary message of this morning.
Bless challenge and blessing. God will give us a challenge that he wants to bless us through.
Move closer to God, live a life that draws near the Lord, express that faith to love those within
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your sphere of influence, and allow God to mold you and change you, to grow in the gifts of the
spirit and to see what God can and will do in your life. In Galatians 5 22 through 23,
but the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,
and gentleness, and self-control. You might just end up with an enduring legacy like Simon
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or even of our founder, Pastor Wayman Mitchell. So if I could have every head bowed, every eye
closed real quick as I finish this sermon off. Challenge and blessing. Do hard things. These are
ideas that I feel God is pressing on me lately because I've always been one to want to,
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that was willing to allow myself to be challenged. And I'm not saying I don't get lazy like everybody.
I'm not saying that I don't like the easy things or the comfortable things.
I like to relax sometimes, don't get me wrong. Challenge and blessing. Do the hard things.
Do the hard things. These ideas all to me because I think that we live in a time that's going to be
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necessary for us to challenge what we are doing so that we can see God's blessing. And that's going
to require us doing very hard things because our societies are moving away from God. And so maybe
as you're listening to this message today wherever you are, maybe you're not right with God.
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And maybe this message is like really honing in on you with the sense that you need to get your
heart right and you need to be filled with the Holy Spirit. If that's you right now, if you know
that you're not right with God but you want to be, I want you to signify that with an uplifted hand
wherever you are. I can't see you but God sees you. And I'm telling you right now that if you
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feel conviction, if you feel that almost like guilt or whatever that's in your heart saying,
I need to get right with my Maker, then raise your hand. God sees that hand wherever you are,
whenever you're listening to this because I might not be omnipresent but God is. So if you're
listening to this today or tomorrow or five years from now, God will know your heart. So if you
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rose your hand, I want you to repeat after me, Dear Lord God, I know that I'm a sinner but I know
that you sent your Son Jesus Christ and that He died for my sins, that He rose from the grave
and I repent of my sins and accept Him as my Lord and Savior and I accept salvation through grace
in Jesus' name. Amen. And that simple prayer is you recognizing that sin is sin and you need to
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cast that out. So really quick as a closing to today's message, I also just want to give a quick
prayer saying, Lord God, I pray you are a mighty and powerful God. I pray that those who prayed
that prayer or those that are listening and need an infilling of the Holy Ghost that you would fill
them right now, wherever they are, wherever they be, whatever time it is that the Holy Spirit would
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come and fill them with power and might so that they would see the challenge and be blessed. They
would leave from listening to this message and go and do hard things in your Holy Mighty name. In
Jesus' name I pray. Amen. So I want to thank you for listening to these messages. Again, if you
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have, if you like what you're hearing, please like, share, subscribe, all that kind of stuff so that
we can get this message out to many, many more people. And I just want to thank you for listening
again and I can't wait for you to come back next time. God bless.
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Amen.
Welcome to the Potter's House Salmon Arm podcast. We are a Bible-Believing Church located
(00:12):
in beautiful British Columbia, Canada. We are proudly part of the Christian Fellowship
Ministries with 3,000 churches around the world. We are a church focused on world evangelism,
discipleship and church planting. Here we will share recent sermons from P.H.S.A. Church
and other sermons from throughout our fellowship. I am Pastor David Bigford and I will be your
host for this podcast. I thank you for listening today and we hope these messages are a blessing
(00:36):
to you and bring you closer to God.
Hello, welcome back to the podcast. My name is David Bigford. I'm the pastor here in
Salmon Arm and I just want to thank you again for coming back to another podcast episode.
(00:57):
This is a message I put together called A Hunger for Holiness. I preached this way back
in April and the subheading of this message is, Arise and Go Down to the Potter's House.
So you can kind of guess where scripture is coming from today. If you're going to follow
along our text is Jeremiah 7 verses 16-20 and Jeremiah 18-11. So in kind of highlighting
(01:26):
the idea of this message, A Hunger for Holiness, I just also want to point out that this is
something we desperately need in our time today. We really need to focus in on who you're
going to be, who you want to be in the Lord or if you're not saved at this point you need
it. Of course get saved but you need to think about what is your legacy going to look like?
(01:47):
What are people going to think of you when your time is done here on earth? It's something
that is of real validity in our day and age as things are going crazier and crazier and
seem to be spinning out of control. What kind of person, what kind of being, what kind of
man or woman are you going to decide to be? So let's look at this illustration I found
(02:14):
called The Lasting Legacy of Simon Nisambi. East Africa's second generation Christians
were facing the age-old spiritual problem of dullness of heart, something that we all
battle with in our societies today. Simon, I'm going to just say Simon but it could be
Simon Nisambi's message of victorious life sparked a revival that continues to this day.
(02:40):
His dream was to study abroad so he applied for scholarships, finished filling out the
form and placed the envelope carefully into the mail and with the posting of that letter
in ways he could not imagine he was about to become the leading figure in the East African
or East Africa revival, a 40-year awakening that changed the spiritual map of Eastern
Africa. Simon Nisambi was born in Uganda in 1897 and while Simbe Kamonji, a chief of Uganda's
(03:07):
most dominant tribe, the Buganda, had received his formal schooling at Mengo High School
in King's College, Budo, during World War I he joined the African Native Medical Corps
and was decorated for his distinguished service. After the war in 1920 he was made chief health
officer in the Bugandans King's government. He excelled as an athlete in both football
(03:28):
and wrestling and as a singer and an artist but it was his natural leadership abilities
that would loom largest in his future. Nisambi became a Christian in 1922, three years before
his marriage to Eva Bakaluba with whom he would have 12 children but education, the
one thing necessary to cement his status as Uganda's elite, seemed to occupy this young
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rising star more than the gospel. Studying abroad in his mind was essential. The reply
to his application finally came and he was turned down. His best hope for advancement
had been dashed. Deeply frustrated Nisambi turned to God for answers and a vision came
to him. God spoke to him and asked him a troubling question. What value did a scholarship to
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study abroad have compared with what he already had been given? The pearl of great price,
the gospel of salvation, Nisambi was disturbed by his vision. Ashamed and repentant, Nisambi
began to preach on a tree-studded Narembi hill overlooking the busy center of Kampala,
Uganda's capital. On the street corner near the great Anglican Cathedral of St. Paul,
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the apostle, with its rounded dome he proclaimed the themes of brokenness and renewal. With
those sermons in the streets, the first leaves of revival began to stir.
Let's look at our text to Jeremiah 7, 16-20. As for you, do not pray for this people or
lift up a cry or prayer for them, and do not intercede with me, for I will not hear you.
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Do you not see what they are doing in the cities of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem?
The children gather wood in Father's kindle fire and woman-kneed dough to make cakes for
the Queen of Heaven, and they pour out drink offerings to other gods and provoke me to anger.
Is it I whom they provoke, declares the Lord? Is it not themselves to their own shame? Therefore
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thus says the Lord God, behold my anger and my wrath will be poured out on this place,
upon man and beast, and upon the trees and the field and the fruit of the ground. It will be
burned and not quenched. Let's jump over now to Jeremiah 18, 1-11. The word came to Jeremiah
from the Lord, Arise and go down to the potter's house. And there I will let you hear my words.
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So I went down to the potter's house, and there he was working at his wheel. And the vessel he was
making of clay was spoiled in the potter's hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed
good to the potter to do. Then the word of the Lord came to me, O house of Israel, can I not do
with you as the potter has done, declares the Lord? Behold, like the clay in the potter's hand, so are
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you in my hand, O house of Israel. If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that
I will pluck it up and break down and destroy it, and if that nation concerning which I have spoken
turns away from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to it. And if at
any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will build and plant it, and if it does
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evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will relent of the good that I intended to do it.
Now therefore say to the men of Judah and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, thus says the Lord,
behold I am shaping disaster against you, devising a plan against you. Return everyone from his evil
way, and amend your ways and your deeds. Let's pray, dear Lord, I pray that you would open our
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ears to your word, open our hearts to your word, that we would understand that you call to us,
that you desperately want to pull us out of the sin and the mire that we have created in our own
lives, that you desperately want us to turn to you for every good thing. But also Lord, let us
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understand that it is you who is the potter, and that you can take the clay being molded
and rework it as you see fit. So Lord, let us allow ourselves to be pliable in your hands,
to be created into what you desire for us to be, and help us to serve you in Jesus' mighty name.
Amen. So as our society today, we have placed a lot of importance on the prestige of education,
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the talent of the rock star, the pop star, and the beauty of the model, or the charisma of the
political leader. And do not misunderstand me, I don't begrudge education. You know, I've been,
you know, I was able to use my GI Bill, my military funding to get both a bachelor's and
a master's degree. So I'm not against the idea of education. But what you have to understand
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is just like in our story about Simon Nassambe, we see that in Africa, there was a belief that
studying abroad was the next step of achieving prestige and success. And in our society today,
there is a perception that if you are ever going to be successful, you have to do these things.
The vision that he received was that it is God that can lift up the lowly and can cast down the
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proud. In our two texts, we see two different pictures. The first is a picture of what happens
when the judicial hardness of a people can lead to a spiritual death that can leave no room for
intercessory prayer. Jeremiah was told not to pray for such a rebellious nation that had turned
their back on God and willfully worshiped other gods. This willful spiritual death can cause whole
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societies to look to earthly things to fill the void that is left when God is excluded. It is
important to keep this in mind that Judah had just seen Israel destroyed, but they were still
unwilling to turn back to their Lord God. We see this as the time I'm recording this, the
Democratic National Convention is about to start tomorrow in Chicago in the United States.
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And one of the many things they're doing in celebration of the DNC, the Democratic National
Convention, is that they're going to offer free vasectomies and abortions for the attendees who
are coming to this event. They are clearly putting something above God in their worship of their
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humanistic ideals. So I don't want to get into the weeds in this, but you have to understand
that there's almost a nature of sacrifice to what they're doing. They are quite literally
sacrificing to the God of themselves by having that stationed as part of what they offer within
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their party. And what a large chunk of Americans have decided is the right way to live their life
in service of self. It's a very stark contrast to what our God tells us to do and how our God
tells us to live in service to others. The second picture is a picture of the Potter's House. We
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have taken this name as a church for a specific reason. This is the parable or story that comes
straight from God through the prophet Jeremiah. It tells us that we can never assume to fully
understand God's control in our lives and the lives of the nations of the earth, because we're
all just clay in the hands of the Father. So when you come down to the Potter's House,
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one of our fellowship churches, you have to expect that God is going to challenge you.
God is going to put his hands on you and he is going to want to mold you. And you're going to
have to decide if that's something you're going to allow to do, or if you're going to go off into the
rest of the world and basically you have snubbed God's desire to work with you and on you to go
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and do your own thing. So this brings me to my first point, which is the higher life. For African
Christians like Nisambi, however, the greatest challenge to faith did not come from the
missionary imperialism, witchcraft, or ancestral spirits. So we're jumping back into this story.
For a growing number of the second generation African converts in the 1930s and 40s, the main
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issue was spiritual dullness. They confessed a Lord who rose from the dead, yet many felt
rigor mortis rather than resurrection power was the normative experience in their churches and
their souls. This is something we feel in our society today oftentimes. We'll pray with someone,
we'll see them get saved, but it doesn't last, it doesn't stick before they just kind of go
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off back into their own lives, no longer wanting to pursue or push into the things of God.
It is a battle that we deal with as a church and as a culture, as a people, because so much of our
society is about self that it's so easy for people even as they come in and get saved,
but then they'll walk away and walk away from their salvation altogether sometimes.
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So after his scholarship crisis and God's call to preach, Nisambi still struggled with an inner
emptiness of a soul. He longed to know the power of the divine will and full experience of divine
grace, and help came in the form of a white stranger. J.E. Church, Joe, to his friends, was a
new medical missionary with the Rwandan Mission, an offshoot of the Church Missionary Society
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working in Gahani, or Henni, Gahani Hospital in Rwanda. Like many who had worked with the Rwanda
Mission, Church was an Anglican deeply affected by the higher life teaching of British Keswick
revival, the openly critical of the spiritual state of the church in Uganda and Rwanda.
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Keswick's teaching had its root in the 1875 Dwight L. Moody revival in England. It taught the
power of indwelling, the indwelling sin in a believer can be broken by a strong faith
experience in which the believer both internalizes the death of Christ and surrenders to the control
of the Holy Spirit. This faith experience it taught took place after conversion. After this
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experience, the believer enjoyed victorious Christian living. Without it, the believer lived
in defeat as a carnal Christian. To tie our first text, Jeremiah 7, 16-20, together with this idea
of a higher life, I think it's important to understand and look at 1 John 5, 16-18.
If anyone sees his brother committing a sin, not only does he commit a sin, but he also
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commits a sin against the Church, and he is a Christian. He is a Christian, and he is a
Christian. If anyone sees his brother committing a sin, not leading to death, he shall ask,
and God will give him life. To those who commit sins that do not lead to death, there is a sin
that leads to death. I do not say that one should pray for that. All wrongdoing is sin, but there is
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sin that does not lead to death. We know that everyone who has been born of God does not keep
on sinning, but he who is born of God protects him, and the evil one does not touch him. The
idea here is that there are times when we can pray for our brothers and sisters with intercessory
prayer, because there is a chance for them to turn from their sin that doesn't lead to death. These
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will be the times when we are praying for repentance, sanctification, wisdom, understanding,
or spiritual revival. Other sins lead to death, like apostasy, or when someone is blaspheming the
Holy Spirit. These sins often lead to the hardness of heart that we see with the people of Judah
during the time of Jeremiah. In these situations, we often will lament for those people and nations,
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but we know that they are often too hardened to hear God's word and turn from their folly. They
become deaf to their own conviction, to the spirit of conviction that would work on them.
It's an important thing for us to remember as a church as we seek to preach a gospel of repentance,
salvation, and restoration. We must not allow this fallen world and the politics in this world to
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distract us from living a higher life in Christ. This brings me to my next point, revival fires,
and as we jump back into the story, I just want to make sure that I impress upon you that we are
also living in a time and an age where decisions have to be made. Are you going to willfully walk
down the road of self-satisfaction and hope that as you go through those dark alleys,
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seeking out the things that are going to make you happy for a moment, are they going to lead you to
a paradise, or are they going to lead you to a bondage in sin, bondage in drug use, bondage in
all sorts of wickedness, or are you going to purpose yourself to walk a narrow path? These are
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all decisions we have to make and we often have to make them daily. We daily have to pick up our
cross, the Bible tells us, because it's not something that's easily done. And I preached on
this earlier today when I was doing today's sermon because it's a Sunday, but I was reading a book
called Do Hard Things and I just interject with that. We're meant to do hard things in our
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Christian walk. We don't get to get away from doing just the easy things because the easy things
will oftentimes leave you idle enough to just fall into more self-pleasure. And that leads you to the
pride of self and to be able to fall because of your own pride. So in 1929, finding himself in a
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state of acute spiritual dryness, church took some time off in Kampala and that's where he
encountered Nisambi. Church wrote in his diary of the meeting with Nisambi that would change his
missionary career. Yesterday, a rich Muganda in government service rushed up to me at Nurembi and
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said that he had heard me speaking about surrendering all and coming out for Jesus. He said he had done
so and had great joy in the Lord and he had wanted to see me ever since. And then he said in his own
words that he knew something was missing in the Ugandan church and in himself. What was it? Then I
had the great joy of telling him about the filling of the spirit and the victorious life. Following
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this conversion, Nisambi met with the church again to go over the Schofield notes on filling of the
spirit and prayed to quit all sin and faith. After several days of prayer and Bible study with
Nisambi, church returned to Gahani Hospital and the power of Pentecost. The change in Nisambi
was visible and permanent. He quit his job as a public health worker and devoted himself full time
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to preaching and renewal. When church returned to Kampala several months later, he was confronted
by an irate missionary who demanded, what have you done to Nisambi? Church inquired what the
problem was and she replied, oh, he's gone mad and is going around everywhere asking people if they
are saved. He just left my gardener. She insisted Africans are not ready for this new teaching about
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sanctification and the Holy Spirit. So revival comes when we turn to God and acknowledge our need
for him in our life. In the second text of the morning, we recount the potter and the clay from
Jeremiah 18 and in this piece of scripture, we're shown an eternal truth. God, our creator, has the
right to reform us if we are marred. This can only happen if we allow ourselves to be molded by the
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father. Christianity is all about growth and rebirth and this continuous process that enables
the church to grow and start afresh. So Nisambi was radically set on fire for God with an
infilling of the Holy Spirit. And this is something that often happens is when people see this, even
when they're culturally Christian, they see someone really on fire for God, they recoil because
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I believe that it brings a spirit of conviction on their own lives. But the reality is that he had
stepped into the challenge to do more for God and instead of recoiling saying that's not and I'm not
ready for that, he said I'm all in. I'm all in. And this tremendous infilling comes into his life.
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So we can think of this stuff in another way. When tending a fire, you have to turn the logs over to
allow for more air to come in and stoke the fire. The embers are still hot but left unattended, the
fire begins to cool. When the log in the fire, when the logs in the fire are now just embers,
you have to add more fuel to that fire. This is a picture of growth of the church. We need not only
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to stoke the fire that is in us but also rekindle the fire in those around us and throw more logs
onto the fire. This is how revival can start and be sustained. So God as a soul sovereign has the
absolute right to deal with nations according to their conduct towards him, illustrated in a tangible
form by that molding of the potter and the vessels from clay. So when we think of going down to the
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potter's house, the idea of that is you're leaving from your high places where the temple would have
stood, maybe you're high and mighty in your spirit and you're coming down to where God is
and where God is going to work on you in the potter's house or where Jeremiah exercised his
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prophetic office low to the ground where some well-known potter had his workshop.
The idea of God as the potter is continued into Romans, in Romans 9, 2021,
it says, but who are you, O man, to answer back to God? What does molded say to its molder? Why
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have you made me like this? Has the potter no right over the clay to make out the same lump,
one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? And this is something that's
important to our day and age where in our desire to control everything and in our desire to please
ourselves, we can say, I was made wrong, so I'm just making myself into my own new image.
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And it's very similar to this verse of scripture where it's basically saying,
I have the right to change myself, but God does not have the right to change me
when he's the potter, when he's the one that made you to begin with.
Springs me to my final point, which is enduring legacies.
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Nisambi's preaching at the revival meetings emphasized two themes. The first theme was
echoed in the often repeated phrase, akibi kibi neo, sin is sin. The ugliness and
destructiveness of sin was so clear to him, but of equal emphasis was the softly spoken akisa,
lugandan for mercy. We must always stand against the sin of the world, but it is always with the
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intent to see mercy to be done. We cry out for all people to turn from their sins and accept Christ
through repentance. We cannot lose sight of the grace that holds us all together. So during the
1950s, the revival reached its peak. The Nagenda and church traveled to India,
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America, Europe, Brazil, and all over Africa with the message of brokenness before the cross.
Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya remained the epicenters of the renewal. Church writes that
the leaders of the Christian work and visitors to Kampala would not leave without a visit to Nisambi.
They would also return home with a new challenge and blessing. It's funny how challenges and
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blessings seem to come hand in hand within the scripture. Upon his death in 1978, Nisambi was
the patriarch of a movement that had altered East Africa Christianity. Millions of Christians had
been touched by the revival representing a new vital Christianity shaped by African leadership.
Still, there were many issues left in the African churches. Disagreements and doctrine led many
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splits within the church and this should be expected because God is constantly molding and
remolding us. Even within the church, there is sin and it has to be dealt with from time to time.
It is dealt with by the breaking down and the starting over and that does not mean that this
process is not intentional or necessary. It is a process that is not intended to be done
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or necessary. God is at work in the church just as he was at work in our lives and each of our
lives individually. Though many traditional denominations represented these new structures
of renewal, they prepared Tanzania for the wave of Western Pentecostal missions that came in the
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1970s and 80s. The Pentecostal preachers began new church revivals to the older churches and once
again the struggle between the faith of the older generation and of the saints in the new winds of
the spirit dominated the landscape of the Christian East Africa. Simon de Sambi would have felt right
at home. The decades-long tale of Simon de Sambi is a story of preparation, birth, death, renewal,
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and preparation again. God's work is never done and that is the primary message of this morning.
Bless challenge and blessing. God will give us a challenge that he wants to bless us through.
Move closer to God, live a life that draws near the Lord, express that faith to love those within
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your sphere of influence, and allow God to mold you and change you, to grow in the gifts of the
spirit and to see what God can and will do in your life. In Galatians 5 22 through 23,
but the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,
and gentleness, and self-control. You might just end up with an enduring legacy like Simon
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or even of our founder, Pastor Wayman Mitchell. So if I could have every head bowed, every eye
closed real quick as I finish this sermon off. Challenge and blessing. Do hard things. These are
ideas that I feel God is pressing on me lately because I've always been one to want to,
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that was willing to allow myself to be challenged. And I'm not saying I don't get lazy like everybody.
I'm not saying that I don't like the easy things or the comfortable things.
I like to relax sometimes, don't get me wrong. Challenge and blessing. Do the hard things.
Do the hard things. These ideas all to me because I think that we live in a time that's going to be
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necessary for us to challenge what we are doing so that we can see God's blessing. And that's going
to require us doing very hard things because our societies are moving away from God. And so maybe
as you're listening to this message today wherever you are, maybe you're not right with God.
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And maybe this message is like really honing in on you with the sense that you need to get your
heart right and you need to be filled with the Holy Spirit. If that's you right now, if you know
that you're not right with God but you want to be, I want you to signify that with an uplifted hand
wherever you are. I can't see you but God sees you. And I'm telling you right now that if you
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feel conviction, if you feel that almost like guilt or whatever that's in your heart saying,
I need to get right with my Maker, then raise your hand. God sees that hand wherever you are,
whenever you're listening to this because I might not be omnipresent but God is. So if you're
listening to this today or tomorrow or five years from now, God will know your heart. So if you
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rose your hand, I want you to repeat after me, Dear Lord God, I know that I'm a sinner but I know
that you sent your Son Jesus Christ and that He died for my sins, that He rose from the grave
and I repent of my sins and accept Him as my Lord and Savior and I accept salvation through grace
in Jesus' name. Amen. And that simple prayer is you recognizing that sin is sin and you need to
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cast that out. So really quick as a closing to today's message, I also just want to give a quick
prayer saying, Lord God, I pray you are a mighty and powerful God. I pray that those who prayed
that prayer or those that are listening and need an infilling of the Holy Ghost that you would fill
them right now, wherever they are, wherever they be, whatever time it is that the Holy Spirit would
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come and fill them with power and might so that they would see the challenge and be blessed. They
would leave from listening to this message and go and do hard things in your Holy Mighty name. In
Jesus' name I pray. Amen. So I want to thank you for listening to these messages. Again, if you
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have, if you like what you're hearing, please like, share, subscribe, all that kind of stuff so that
we can get this message out to many, many more people. And I just want to thank you for listening
again and I can't wait for you to come back next time. God bless.
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Amen.
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