Sid Roth - WARNING, America's Future Hinges On ONE THING
Sid Roth: Welcome. Welcome, Holy Spirit. Thank you for being our most gracious, important guest. Dr. Michael Brown is Jewish, has a doctorate from New York University, he speaks, reads and writes over a half a dozen Sematic languages, and is considered one of the top Hebrew Biblical scholars in the world. He has authored 10 books on revival, and experienced three revivals personally. Now, he says God has shown him the next move of God's Spirit. I want Mike to tell us how a Jewish New York Supreme Court Judge's son became radical for Jesus, and then to top it off, he becomes a renowned Sematic scholar, concentrating on proving Jesus is the Jewish Messiah. Mike, how did this all happen, briefly? I've seen pictures with you having not gray hair, not the short hair, but you had it full blazes!
Dr. Michael Brown: Oh, yeah. When my wife, Nancy, saw an older picture of me, because she didn't know me in the hippy days, she started laughing. I said, "You're laughing because I look like a woman". She said, "No, I'm laughing because you look like an ugly woman"!
Sid Roth: Oh, no!
Dr. Michael Brown: So here's the deal. I was raised in a nominal Jewish home, so I was bar mitzvah'd at 13, and so on, but we weren't religious Jews, we didn't go to synagogue every Sabbath or keep the dietary list. But I'm Jewish, I don't believe in Jesus. I get caught up in the counter-culture movement, started getting high at 14, shooting heroin at 15. My two best friends started going to a church. They got born again. I went to pull them out. The people started praying for me. The Holy Spirit convicted me of sin. And then the end of 1971, I met the Lord. I was instantly transformed. I said, I will never put a needle in my arm again. December 17th, '71, free from that moment on by the Power of God. And some days later, my dad said, "Michael, I'm glad you're off drugs, but we're Jews. We don't believe this. You need to talk to the Rabbi". So I become friends with the local Rabbi, I want to share Jesus with everybody, right?
Sid Roth: Of course.
Dr. Michael Brown: And we begin talking back and forth, and he says, "How can you tell us what to believe? You don't know Hebrew". I said, "Well, I'm using this dictionary..." He goes, "Forget it! In the meantime, shmeantime," he said, "You need to know Hebrew. You can't teach us anything"! So I was provoked. I knew Jesus had changed my life, I knew it was real, but how can I talk to these Rabbis and these learned ones that said the New Testament mistranslated the Old? And I didn't know what I was talking about. And you couldn't rely on the English translation. So I majored in Hebrew in college, and then I got a master's and a PhD at New York University, and their Eastern languages and literature, because I said, "I need to be able to read it and study it for myself. I can't rely on another commentary, another dictionary". And then everyone I studied with all through my school, no one believed what I believed. I never studied with someone who believed the things I believed, so I was challenged every single day. For years, I met with Rabbi after Rabbi, ultra-orthodox Rabbis, and the more I studied, the clearer it became. The more I dug, the more I found, whoa! This is amaze, the deeper you dig, the clearer it becomes! Jesus, Yeshua is the Messiah. Sid, I believe I've had the privilege of debating more Rabbis, public debates about Jesus being the Messiah than any human being on the planet today. There's only one problem.
Sid Roth: What?
Dr. Michael Brown: I can't get anyone to debate me!
Sid Roth: Dr. Michael Brown will explain why we should know about past revivals, and God's outpouring of His glory. Why his strong warning about putting God in a box, and his experience with three revivals and his eyewitness report of major miracles.
Dr. Michael Brown: So Sid, when we go back and read The Word, we find out who God is. And we find out what He does, the kind of God He is, and that builds our faith. Why not now? Why not here? So I would read about the past revivals. I'd hear about the glory coming out in the Welsh Revival in 1904-1905, the Hebrides Revival 1949 to 1952, and you hear about God's sovereignly saving. You hear about crime rates dropping. You hear about judges wearing white gloves, because they had no more cases to try. You hear about men in the bars going to have a drink, and they couldn't, because they were under conviction, because their wives were praying. And they fall on the street and get saved and cry out, and you say, "Lord, where is it"? One, it's not a matter of being nostalgic, you say, why not again? The Jesus People Movement when so many of us got saved late '60s, early '70s, among the highest number getting saved, for us Jews, hippies, radicals, rebels all over the world, sovereignly saved. You say, "Lord, we need to have that again. We need to see it again". I am an eyewitness. I prayed, I fasted, I groaned, I cried for years. God showed me in the spring of 1983, I was virtually unknown, just doing my PhD work. God had radicalized my own life with a fresh outpouring of the Spirit, because Sid, along the way to my doctorate, I was getting intellectually, theologically proud. I was embarrassed of my charismatic Pentecostal roots. God rocked my world, brought me to repentance, sanctifier. Brought me back to my first love. The fire fell in our church. The church ended up rejecting what God was going after months of outpouring. And God spoke to me, "You'll be in a revival that will touch the whole world". First I thought, I'm crazy. It's not the case. The more I prayed, the more angst, the more He made it clear. Thirteen years, I held to it, I cried out. And then Brown's Revival, God brought me right in the thick of that. And I can tell you what I saw with my own eyes. I can tell you stories of people that I knew, knew the people, you know, one night, these two Playboy Bunnies, they're in Pensacola, Florida, there was going to be a photo shoot there on the beaches. Hurricane-like weather cancels it, so they got a free night. They hire a taxi.. where is the action in Pensacola?
Sid Roth: Playboy Bunnies?
Dr. Michael Brown: Playboy Bunnies. The driver says, "The church in Pensacola"! And he drives into the church, that's where the action is! The end of the service, they're there weeping and shaking in repentance. John Kilpatrick, the pastor, goes over to see what's going on with these ladies. One of them says, "We feel like God shook the hell out of us"! One of my friends got to know one of the ladies well, I mean, they came under conviction, they read The Word. They said, "We can't do what we were doing anymore". One of them got to know them well for years. A guy comes into the church, the son of an Assembly of God pastor. He's openly homosexual, he's in relationship with a gay man. He's angry with God, he's angry with Brownsville because of what God's doing there. But obviously something's happening in the man's heart. He walks into the building, the Power of God hits him in the vestibule of the building. He's laid out there. The ushers carry him and lay him in the front of the building at the altar, where he stays the whole night, gets radically born again and changed. A friend of mine has known him for years, a transformed man by the Power of God. This is the kind of stuff that happened...
Sid Roth: You mean just laying under the Power of God, a lifestyle of homosexuality, sexual activity was just lifted from him?
Dr. Michael Brown: The Spirit of God, the piercing Word of God, the call for repentance. The man opens his heart and is radically transformed. I'm preaching in a church in New Jersey some years ago, the Spirit's moving powerfully. The pastor says, "You need to hear our story". He said, "Five of us pastors went down to Pensacola, we were in the services, we enjoyed the meetings. We were blessed. But we left disappointed. We were expecting more. We get on the plane to fly back Sunday afternoon, we're going to be at our Sunday night service at the church. We bought five tickets together, somehow they're all separated. We get on the plane, it's a short flight to Atlanta and we transfer planes". He said, "As I sit down and the plane's about to take off, the Spirit falls on me, and I begin weeping on the plane". He can't wait to get off to tell the others, only to find out it happened to all five simultaneously, separately on the plane. It was God's way of saying, "It's not the crowds, it's not the hype. It's my Spirit". He goes, "From there, the Spirit falls in their church". Two years later, they were still in an outpouring. I mean, I heard this day and night, the most dramatic story I was involved with, in the middle of nowhere in Canada, why we ended up there, who knows? There were some First Nation people, some native Canadians there. They had come very discouraged. They were on a reserve, a reservation, with 1200 people. A little church had gone through a split, and now they had two little churches.
Sid Roth: Hmm.
Dr. Michael Brown: They were among a thousand people that heard the message that night. I laid hands on every one of them. But something happened in them. One year later, I had this confirmed by three independent eyewitnesses, one year later, they had been going with meetings night after night after night, because the Spirit fell one year later, 1150 out of the 1200 on the reserve had come to Jesus. That's God. That only happens when the Spirit works. And that's why we say, "Do it again, God! If you can do that, if in a few months the work of years and decades could take place", we launched a missions move in that, raised up a ministry school. Some of our missionaries have been on the road now for 25 years overseas, and they're seeing God change lives. That's the lasting fruit of revival. We must have it again today. The situation in America, in the world, is more urgent than it ever is. God's going to move with greater urgency than ever.
Sid Roth: And very briefly, what do you mean when you say, "Don't put God in a box"?
Dr. Michael Brown: When God moves, when He shakes us out of the wrong place, it almost always gets us out of our comfort zone. When Jesus, He lifts it... why did He spit on dirt and turn it into mud? Why did He spit on a guy's eyes? Why did He do that? Why did He try to...
Sid Roth: If He did it today, they'd say, "You're not of God"!
Dr. Michael Brown: And magicians use spittle. Magicians would do it. The false gods, they said they had the spittle of life among the false gods. Why did he drive demons into the pigs and the pigs go running down and drown in the water? That can't be God. Show me tongues of fire. The moment the Spirit falls, there's division. God's not the author of confusion. He doesn't say Prophet-A, prophesy they'll be rain, Prophet-B prophesy there'll be no rain. No. But when the Spirit comes, He brings up to the surface what's in people's hearts and minds. And almost always, when the fire falls, just like at Pentecost, half of them hear the praises of God, and the other people, they say, "They're drunk". When the Spirit falls, either people are shaking under the Power of God like happened with Wesley in Whitfield, or falling or crying out, or demons leaving, there's something that's going to scandalize us. We like a nice little revival. Here's our traditional prayer for revival. "God, send Your power, send Your glory, but Lord, leave us in control. Keep it to a convenient little hour". And revival is not something you turn on, you turn off. We use discernment, we use wisdom, but we say, "God, come and shake us and come and visit, whatever the cost or consequence, because that's one thing we can't live without. That's Your presence".
Sid Roth: Now, God showed Mike in 1995 the magnitude of the power of the coming greater glory. It will make Niagara Falls look like a dribble. Be right back.
Sid Roth: I told Dr. Brown before we got back on the air the most important, in my opinion, question I'm going to ask him is right now. Why do you say repentance, or turning from sin, is so important?
Dr. Michael Brown: Repentance is everything, not just in our relationship with God, but especially when we talk about revival. Repentance prepares the way for the visitation of God. Frank Bartleman, used in the Azusa Street Revival said that the depth of any revival will be determined by the spirit of repentance that is obtained. God comes as a refiner's fire. He brings to the surface all the junk, all the uncleanness, all the things that are all... Because we've left our First Love, because we've compromised with the world. Because we've lost the power of God, because we've become religious and proud. Because we've allowed sin to come into our lives. Repentance clears the way. Repentance is the first word of the Gospel, it's what John the Baptist preaches, what Jesus preaches, what the apostles preach. Paul said, "I preach that all men everywhere should repent, and to the churches in Asia Minor," five out of seven, he says, "Repent, or else". If you want God to come in your life, He will pour out a spirit of repentance. He will uncover things, not to condemn us, but to cleanse us. Not to hurt us, but to help us. I want to say to every single one of you, if you really are hungry and thirsty for God, it will be uncomfortable, because He may uncover pride or wrong motives or wrong attitudes, or lack of love or lack of faith. But it's all for the good. Let the refiner's fire do its work. The muck, the junk is in there anywhere. The Spirit will purge it out so that you can shine for God. And if we want God in our churches, the Holy Spirit will only come where He is welcome and where He feels at home. Therefore, we must deal with sin if we want the Glory of God.
Sid Roth: And as I like to say, and you do too, I personally walk in instant repentance. Why? Because I know that if I don't, it'll become a stronghold, and become much... it's never easier than instantly when the Holy Spirit convicts you. Say, "God, I'm sorry". But if you just ignore it, it can grow like a cancer. And sin grows like a cancer. And there are many of you that have never entered into heaven, forgiveness of your sin, not just forgiveness under the new covenant, God says, "I, God, will not only forgive you, but I, God, will remember your sins no more". That is... only God could do that. Say this prayer, mean it to the best of your ability. It's time for you to enter in all the way. Repeat it out loud after I speak. "Dear God. Please forgive me for every sin I've ever committed. I believe Your blood washed me clean. And now that I'm clean because of what You did for me Jesus, come and live inside of me. Thank You for saving me from my sins. And now I make You Lord over every area of my life. Amen". Mike, you had the most supernatural, amazing encounter at Niagara Falls.
Dr. Michael Brown: So years ago, early '90s, I'm at Niagara Falls with our older daughter, Jennifer, a young girl at that point, young teenager. So we're there together at the Falls, we're on the Canadian side of the Falls, it's just absolutely stunning. So as we were walking towards the Falls, I see just kind of, you know, the water running down there, and I thought, that's a picture of normal church life, you know? It's good, okay, as you get closer, it starts to, you know, there are rapids, and it starts to intensify. And I thought, that's what most people would call "revival". That's just the thing starting to get more intense. But that's not revival yet. I just had this sense that Niagara Falls was like a picture of revival. So as we got close, it's just staggering, overwhelming. I said, "No, no, no, I want to experience the Falls for myself". So I went with Jen. You get these jackets, these yellow jackets...
Sid Roth: I've done the same.
Dr. Michael Brown: ...okay, and this case, we walk and stand under the Falls. So the water's pounding and churning, and the wind is blowing, it's overwhelming. And all I could do is raise my hands in worship, and I thought, that is a picture of revival. I wrote a book that came out three months before Brownsville. Three months before the revival, I shared that picture of Niagara Falls. I said, "That is a picture of revival. Are you ready"? I knew it was about to hit. And Sid, we are in the early stages now of the Holy Spirit beginning to pour out in a fresh way in America, but it's not just going to be a Brownsville or a Toronto... there will be thousands of places where the fire falls, and we must seize the moment when it happens.
Sid Roth: You know, Mike, interesting enough, I had a vision about Niagara Falls also, and in this vision, I was there by myself, and the mist that you described started coating me. And it was the light of God. It was the presence of God. It was the Glory of God. And many people don't know this, almost every day they have a rainbow there. What does a rainbow stand for? The promises of God, the covenants of God. So all the promises of God in that glory are going to be instantly unstoppable, amazing answers instantly. It's going to be different than any time you've ever, or any generation has ever walked with God. And I'm telling you, I was there alone. You know what that meant? I can't ride on someone else's faith. I've got to ask for myself. I have to hunger and thirst for righteousness. Mike, I want you to turn around and look at this right now. You know, Mike, I don't know how many years this has been going on, but imagine the unlimited power for this to never stop? It just keeps going on, what we're seeing right now. That's what's coming. The unlimited, unstoppable Power of God.
Dr. Michael Brown: Sid, what else is going to get the job done? How else will two billion Muslims turn to Jesus? How else will Israel be saved? How else will America be shaken? There has to be a greater, sustained move of God with intensity, with rapidity, than we've ever seen. And as I sit, I mean, obviously we're not at the Falls, but it's stirred, boy, does it stir the memories. And you know, it reminds me again, every day we have to live as disciples. Every day we do the little things. Every day the mom's changing a diaper and dad's busy doing, we do our daily work. The church is doing the work the disciples should do day by day. But Sid, when we have experienced the glory, when we've been under those Falls, so to say, how can we live without it? How can we just go back to normal church life, those of us who've tasted it and seen it? And those who've just heard about it. They read about Brownsville like I read about the Welsh Revival. I want to shout to everyone, "It's real"! It's the nature of God. It's the reality of God. And what He wants to do is the thing that's been abnormal, that's been exceptional... He wants that to be the norm. He wants that to be the climactic thing before He returns. Why not now? Why not here? Why not something greater than we've ever seen? Does God not have the ability? He does. Does God not have the desire? He does. How about us? Hungering and thirsting until the answer comes.
Sid Roth: You said something... "Why not now? Why not here"? Would you pray for us? So it is now!
Dr. Michael Brown: Yes.
Sid Roth: It is here!
Dr. Michael Brown: Yes. Father, right now, I pray for every single one watching. May there be a hunger, a thirst, a desire, a passion, the likes of which they've never known. May they have a cry that comes from the depth of their being. God, visit me now. God, send the fire now. God, change me now. God, send Your glory now, for Your honor, for the sake of a dying world, for the exaltation of the Name of Jesus. For the salvation of the Jewish people here and now, start with me. I ask it in Jesus' Name, Amen.
Sid Roth: You live a holy life, God says, "Be holy, for I am holy". Instant, instant, instant repentance. Got it?