Hello and welcome back to the PHSA podcast.
My name is David Bigford.
I'm the pastor here at SalmonArm.
This is a very special podcast series where I'm going to be sharing with you messages
from our most recent conference in Prescott, Arizona, the Beyond Limits Conference with
a theme of to preach the gospel in the regions beyond from 2 Corinthians 10-16.
I'm going to share all of the sermons from this conference series to include Greg Mitchell,
our head pastor, Joe Campbell, Richard Ruby, Tom Payne, and many, many others during this
series.
So I'll be sharing these with you over the next couple of weeks, and I hope you really
enjoy these messages.
If you'd like to see these messages in a video format, you can go to prescottpottershouse.com
where all of these will be available for you to view in a video format.
So without further ado, I'm going to pass, I'm going to go ahead and move on to the messages
and I hope you enjoy them.
God bless.
Mighty King, glorious, glorious Savior, and to stand here today, I'm very thankful and
feel very privileged to minister, and our God is good.
We've come, many of us here, full of excitement, full of zeal, and full of anticipation.
There may be someone sitting here that had some very bad news just before the conference,
and you received a phone call.
It's very, very serious, and I want to pray for you first.
So if that's you, if you'd put your hand in the air, I'd like to pray for you.
Okay, I want you to, could you stand for me, sister, please?
Amen.
But just say to you that, amen, make sure it's you.
May God strengthen you and comfort you.
Bad news makes your mind go to all sorts of places.
You may be going through right now, you may in fact go through a very hard time, up and
down.
But what God wants you to know is the conclusions where your mind is taking you is not going
to be what you think.
God's got the end, and so you can be assured of that.
Amen.
Father, strengthen her, bless her, God, and keep her by your grace and by your love and
by your mercy.
Amen.
Father, we're very thankful.
We're thankful.
Amen.
Praise God.
How are you, my brother?
There in the white, how are you?
You're doing good.
Amen, would you stand for me?
Amen.
You know, sometimes we're about to make decisions, and they're very crucial, but they're the
wrong ones.
And I think that you're facing something, and it's been a real battle, and you're about
to make a wrong decision.
And the reason why God has called you out, many of us make wrong decisions, and we blunder,
and we're insane.
The reason why God is calling you out is he's been trying to speak to you, to advise you
not to do this.
But the reason why he's bringing you in this atmosphere is because many years ago, you
did something before him.
I'm thinking it's a gift.
I'm thinking it's an offering.
I'm thinking you did something that really pleased him, and he really loves you, brother,
and he wants you to do well.
So whatever the decision is that you're about to make, make it right.
God's got your back.
Amen.
God bless you.
Amen.
Praise the Lord.
Who's your pastor?
Pastor Felipe.
Where are you?
Is he here?
Oh, right there.
Stand up, my brother.
Amen.
I know you've been praying.
You've been praying for your brother.
You've been praying for your disciple.
You've been praying for his pastor, I see you.
God wants you to know that you can pray about a lot of things.
We all pray about a lot of things.
But when you pray about his church, and when you pray about his people, it's like you have
a direct route to heaven.
There's a lot of prayers.
We're all praying about a lot of things, and I guess we all struggle.
God, are you hearing me?
Are you going to, you know what I'm saying is we're all in the same, Lord, help me, blah,
blah, blah.
But God wants you to know, and every pastor, when you pray specifically, when you pray
and you say God, and you begin to bring people before God, his people, you have a direct
throne.
So don't be tempted to take things into your own hands.
Don't be tempted to walk in your own strength.
Your prayers, like any pastor, but they have a very, very powerful thing.
Amen.
God bless you, my brother.
Amen.
God minister to you.
Praise the Lord.
Pastor Scott Lamb, I just want to tell you, I love you, and you're an absolute blessing
to me and Carol, you and Sister Gayle.
And you, I don't know if this makes any sense, but I just wanted you to know there's a lot
of people here that have been touched by your ministry.
I would dare say you're on every single person's top five preachers.
There wouldn't be a person here.
You wouldn't hit the top five, top three, maybe top two, who knows.
But everybody loves your ministry and your preaching.
But I feel that you need to know that you have more sons than you think, that there's
a lot of people that you might not understand, but you have become like a father.
And your ministry and who you are have covered them more than you think.
That word son, I think you need to, is what I want to bring to you.
It's more than just your ministry's blessed all of us, but you have ministered and sons
are appreciative.
Amen.
God bless you, pastor.
Thank you very much.
Amen.
And I guess talking about fathers and thinking about that, I, several years ago I lost my
father.
He passed into eternity and I was talking to Pastor Ernie Toppin.
He had also, at that time, he'd lost his dad.
Now his relationship with his father was not a good one and he was particularly grieving
and struggling with that.
And so we were talking and kind of sharing our experiences and God had spoken to Ernie
and said to him, the reason why you're coming to me is because I'm your father.
We were talking about it and I just, it's when you lose your father, when you lose your
dad, it's really funny, funny is the wrong word.
Not funny, ha ha.
Ha ha ha ha.
No, no, not funny.
No, not funny.
Even if you weren't close, it feels like something's missing.
It just kind of feels like there's, I don't know, I just, with the loss of my dad, it
just kind of, I don't know, just felt kind of empty.
There was something there and we were talking about the pain and we were talking about the
inner ache that that creates in the human soul.
And the more we talked about it, the more we became aware of the presence of God in
our discussion.
We became aware of his heart for the fatherless.
And as we were talking, Ernie made a comment that hit me profoundly.
He said, I believe, Pastor Ernie Toppin, he said, I believe the last day's revival is
going to be made up of the fatherless.
And as he said those words, something clicked in my soul and in my spirit.
It was like a revelation moment.
I could see God's heart, God's heart for the fatherless.
I could sense him wanting to draw them, call them, reach them.
And it actually changed how I drove home that day from prayer.
I live in Waltham Forest, London.
It can be a little third-worldish.
In areas very dirty, very, very, there's a large Muslim population.
There's a lot of transient, there's a lot of, it's a lot of chaos.
Sometimes that's good, we can do whatever we want, but sometimes it's very hard to have
faith.
But as I was driving home that day and I'm looking, I'm looking whether they were Muslim,
whether they were, it didn't matter what nationality, it didn't matter how they looked, it didn't
matter to me what their religion looked like it would be.
I felt when Jesus said, lift up your eyes and look at the fields for they're already
white for harvest.
It was like everyone I looked at, I suspected came from family hurt and dysfunction.
People as I drove, I could see people, I could feel it's like their misunderstanding, neglect,
abandonment, the fatherless.
And I sensed the same God that made himself real to myself and Pastor Ernie as we were
talking was going to make himself real to the broken.
Pastor Scott Lamb was in London at the time and we discussed with him and another pastor,
we discussed with him about what we were feeling and out of that came this message.
There is coming a revival amongst the fatherless.
Matthew 4 verse 6 it says these words, and he will turn the hearts of the fathers to
the children and the hearts of the children to their fathers lest I come and strike the
earth with a curse.
Now I want to look with you first of all at the transcendent father.
There's something I guess in all of us that craves a father, something in all of us that
searches for him when he's not there.
It's like something, it's like a longing that's unidentifiable almost.
It's many people's experience.
We live in a time and an age where probably in every nation a huge part of our population
is being raised without a father.
We hear often and we understand the effect that that's having on society.
We know it means four times the greater risk of poverty.
We understand the higher likelihood of prison and addictions.
We witnessing the very troubled youth that are before us.
We talk about that.
We understand that.
We discuss amongst ourselves the impact on the church.
We talk about the difficulty that perhaps we face in discipleship.
Now a fatherless generation unable often to take correction, seeing it as rejection, highly
emotional, et cetera, et cetera.
Those things have helped us and given us grounding and understanding, but what is often perhaps
not considered as much is God's heart.
In our text there is a statement written millenniums ago by a prophet that identifies a last day's
generation.
In that generation he speaks where a father is separated from their child and a child
from their father of all the things that that prophet could have seen of our generation.
Of all the things that he could have spoken about and had been spoken about by others
he identifies it as a generation of separated fathers.
It's like it's noted by heaven.
It matters to God.
It moves the heart of God.
This is highlighted because I believe God gets involved right here.
Now I've mentioned before, some of you may know I was adopted by some very good parents,
but I remember one time I was probably six or seven years old.
We were living at that time in England and I woke up, I'm six, seven years old, like
you know just woke up, it was a Sunday morning and all I can tell you is that I had been
moved on.
I woke up and I had this huge desire to go to church and I wanted to go to church.
I'm six, seven years old.
I just, and I came downstairs to where my parents were getting breakfast and I said
mom, dad, I said I want to go to church and they're looking at me like really?
I said yeah, no, no, I really, I want to go to church.
And so, okay, so there we lived in a little village at that point and there was a little
Anglican church in the middle of it and so they dropped me off there and they went to
walk the dogs, as you do.
I want to tell you, I'm six, seven years old and I'm standing at the back of the church.
It's just a little Anglican church.
I am singing those hymns like just I am singing.
It was so real that the vicar came at the end of the service, he came up to me and he
said it's so nice, so nice, so nice to see a young person in church.
You know it's funny, I left that building and the next Sunday, slept in, didn't think
about it every game until I got saved many years later in Australia and I remembered
that moment but I've always felt there was something different about my life.
I saw him at Ernie Toppin, we were sharing stories, us pastors and he said it's amazing
you would say that.
He remembered his family life, very traumatic, early days, father relationships, et cetera
and he felt horribly alone.
He was five or six years old and he had a dream.
It's like a face in the sky, it kind of appeared and he just, even at five or six years old
he knew it was God and the voice said to him, are you going to behave yourself because I'm
going to visit you later.
Pastor Kenneth Van Fleet has allowed me to share some of his testimony.
He was raised in an orphanage, he was put in the orphanage at the age of about 18 months,
one and a half years old.
Born to a Ghanaian father, a Bulgarian mother, grew up for many years in this orphanage,
not a good scene.
He was so broken he could hardly talk, full of fear, little boy, constantly in trouble.
He's now four, five or six, somewhere around that age and he's in the garden, he's in the
grounds of the orphanage and he saw a spider crawling up, going up a plant and on the back
of that spider was a huge white cross.
They have those in Holland.
It didn't mean anything to him but it just caught his attention just enough to quieten
his soul and he said, I heard a voice.
He said, I don't know if it was audible or just inaudible, I don't know how to explain
it but I heard a voice, I knew it was God, I knew it was my creator and the voice said,
will you live for me, little boy?
And he said, I made a conscious decision, not now but when I'm older.
God have mercy upon Jennifer.
Not now, when I'm older.
But the point is God had visited, I don't think it's surprising.
I think there's something in the heart of God that I'm trying to bring to your attention.
It is a very spiritual notion that God visits the orphan and the widow.
The Bible says in Psalms 146 verse 9, the Lord protects the foreigners, he defends the
orphans and widows, he blocks the way of the wicked.
Jeremiah 49, 11, leave your fatherless children, I will keep them alive, your widows too can
depend on me.
There is something in the heart of God, simple thought.
There is something in the heart of God when he sees somebody separated from their father,
distant from the one they should be close to.
We read of there's something in his heart that's drawn, remember Hagar, she has run
off because of Sarah, Genesis 21.
The Bible says she breaks down.
She goes, she's sitting and she thinks to herself, I cannot watch the boy die in Genesis
21.
And so she sat there and she began to sob.
And then the Bible says God heard the boy crying.
God sees a boy crying, rejected by his father, sent out.
I want to tell you, you want to talk about something that touches the nerves, that touches
the nerve string of God, that touches his very heart.
If there's no reconciliation, the text says between a son and his father, I'm going to
strike the land.
That's who God is.
And so maybe you're sitting here and there's a lot of our stories.
So let's think about being in the house of the father, because given the enormous gravity
of this fatherhood issue in the heart of God, it stands to reason that God's prophetic purpose
is expressed in our text.
I will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the children to the fathers.
It's an end times prophecy.
It's like God is targeting something.
God is keenly interested in something.
There's a lot of hurt involved in this.
In fact, we were sitting there and we were talking about this and one of our pastors
was their pastor, Kazin Cole, and he made the comment, we were talking about orphanages
and we were talking about our lot in life.
And he said, I used to wish when I was a little boy that I was in an orphanage because of
the terrible violence that he witnessed.
Many people come to church this way.
They come into the household.
They come into the house of God.
Their hurts are buried, resentful of authority, mistrusting, unable to relate, carrying loads
of baggage.
And God says, I have a plan for you.
Ernie, Pastor Ernie Topp and walking through the park now, he's nine years old and incredibly
alone and it's like he came to the conclusion at nine years old, I am alone in this world.
It is the way it is.
There's no way around this.
This is my lot.
This is my life.
Nine years old, walking in a park, comes to the conclusion, it is me against the world.
I'm alone.
And yet we're drawn.
We're drawn into a house like this, into a new culture.
We're drawn into the Father's home.
We're drawn into his house, the church.
And with salvation, when we bow our knee and we confess our sins and put our faith in Christ,
with salvation comes a culture of reconciliation.
God begins to work in us about reconciliation.
The first is reconciliation with God.
And we find in our experience that God takes up the mantle of fatherhood.
We find in reality, he becomes the father that we never had.
In Psalm 68, 5, he is a father to the fatherless.
He's a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling.
He's a helper.
He says, I've got you.
He's a defender.
Those of you sitting here, this one, God says, hey, I notice you.
I've seen what's wrong.
I've got you.
And you who were once alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, Colossians 1.21,
yet now has he reconciled.
And we come to church.
We begin to find things change because in Christ all things become new.
And all of a sudden we're sitting down in church and we begin to hear things that we've
never heard before.
Things that challenge our hatred.
Things that challenge our anger.
Things that we feel that we have pushed down so deeply.
And yet God in the passage of time brings it up so that he can heal it.
The spirit of the Lord is upon me, Jesus said, because he's anointed me to preach the gospel
to the poor.
He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted.
And we sit in church and we become reassured that his love is unchanging.
One thing I found in my own walk with God, I've become more and more confident in his
love.
You find that as you walk with him.
In longevity as time goes on, you become more aware, hey, hey, hey, I don't deserve anything.
And yet you become more and more assured of God's love.
It's incredible.
His love's unchanging, constant forever.
And then as we sit in his presence and we begin to grow in that assurance, then he begins
to deal with us about reconciling our hearts.
Reconciling with our fathers or our fatherhood issues.
Because sometimes it's not possible to reconcile physically.
Sometimes there is death.
Many times there's a father who's unknown.
Sometimes it would not be wise to be reconnected for legal issues, et cetera, et cetera, because
there are deep issues.
But yet what we do find is an urge.
It's a whisper.
It's a whisper to forgive.
It's a whisper to learn another perspective.
To understand there are those that have failed us and to see them as sinners, lost, begin
to gain God's perspective.
Begin to understand that they too, like us, broken.
And I understand that everyone's different, but perhaps for just a moment we get glimpses
of empathy.
Or at the very least, God begins to help us to process our lives.
There begins to be a clarity and a healing.
And then he begins to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of
the children to their fathers.
And then in us begins to heal and our hearts begin to turn and we're able to process it
correctly.
We begin to minister differently.
Pastor Success tells the story.
We've heard it many times how there was a young man in his church always involved in
fights and he was actually a Bible study leader.
And sure enough, Sunday morning he's having a full on scrap.
This is in Lagos, Nigeria, Bible study leader having a scrap outside church.
As you do sometimes, you know.
So he's having this scrap and then Pastor Success, he's a young pastor.
He calls in a young, Michael sits him down, begins to, what on earth are you doing?
This man, this young man stands up, begins to shout that Pastor Success.
Now you've got to understand this is Nigeria.
This is Man of God turf, right?
He's shouting and then he storms out.
Success is a young man.
He gets up.
He's going to chase after this young disciple that's just slammed the door and taken off.
And as he gets up and he's going to give him, I'm Man of God, you speak to him.
You know, he's going to get up and give the big and you know, get up and he get, and God
speaks.
He's not speaking to you.
He's speaking to his father.
I want to tell you, we learn to minister differently and in his presence, we realize our need of
him.
And we find ourselves in a family, the family of God.
And we grow with a sense of protection and we grow with a sense that we have a father
who will never leave us.
And we understand actually we were chosen.
Actually we've been adopted into his family.
Actually we belong.
We belong here.
We feel loved and healed and assured and bit by bit we're made whole.
We're able to forgive those that have deserted.
We're able to forgive those that have hurt us.
We're able to reconcile where possible.
In fact, we're able to love when we could not love before.
It is a miracle what we're involved in.
He fills the void and heals our heart.
So when we think about that, it makes us realize that perhaps we're looking at a key to the
harvest and in it we begin to look and perhaps it suggests to us an overarching plan of God
for this generation.
You cannot talk to a pastor.
You cannot talk to anyone without him saying about his congregation how many come from
broken homes.
The very thing that our enemy, the very thing that Satan accomplishes by the stripping children
of their fathers, the very thing that evil intends to do to destroy people's lives, the
greatest thing that perhaps we can see as the obstacle to the gospel and discipleship.
In fact, God is going to turn and use to reach a fatherless generation.
We have an unusual opportunity before us.
In fact, I would put to you that it's right under our noses.
I would put to you just like Jesus said to his disciples, you need to look up and lift
up your eyes because you're missing it.
You're not seeing it.
He just ministered to a Samaritan woman in John 4, but they had their preconceptions.
They looked at a certain group of people said they'll never get saved.
We walk our streets and we look at people and we write them off for so many reasons.
Their money, their background, their religion, their this, their that, but yet strip it back.
How many of them are walking and they're walking fatherless and they're walking broken and
there's something in their hearts and there's something in their lives just like God did
for me, for Pastor Kenneth Van Fleet, Pastor and others that are sitting here.
I'm sure there are many stories.
There's something that God is drawn to them.
And I would put to you that perhaps there is something in their hearts.
They might not recognize it, but as the broken and as the fatherless, there is a peculiar
sensitivity, a peculiar hunger, an inner drawing for a father.
Combine that inner desire with God's instinct to guard, protect, intervene.
I would put to you in the last days, it is speaking of a miracle reconciliation.
That God is going to move upon the fathers and children.
God is going to pour out his Spirit on all flesh.
Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy a movement amongst the youth caught up for
a love for the eternal father.
And I would ask you and suggest to you that all around you are a people that God has already
visited when they were young.
You have no idea, you walk right past them and in their heart they cried out to God and
God heard them.
And all it's going to take is you to speak to them.
It's for you to preach to them.
It's you to tell them of the father's house.
You know, we were straight after this, we worked on this, we went to Pastor Ernie's
dad's funeral.
As we were gathered there, Pastor Ernie had spoken at the funeral again, his family is
pretty disjointed.
They were nephews and nieces.
I don't think he'd even met that kind of a family.
But we were standing there and as we were standing, there were probably four or five
pastors there with Pastor Ernie and this young man, he's got earrings and I can't remember
what else, but he kind of comes up obviously, anyway, he comes up and he's talking to us
and he picks up very quickly, we're preachers.
He's come to see his uncle Ernie and he makes this comment, he said, you know what, it's
funny.
He says, as a young boy I was desperate to get baptized.
He just said it.
He's clearly not saved.
He said, I felt the call to preach.
I wanted to do something for God.
His mother refused him and time has now moved on and he's doing what he's doing.
I'm just trying to say to you, in broken families, there are people sitting there that are crying
out to God and God sees them and loves them and one has moved on them and he's waiting
for us to preach the gospel, to reach out and put the net out there and to see them.
I have a prayer.
We did a Father's Day service and we were a little, I must confess, we were a little
bit disorganized and I think next time we'll be better, but in our Father's Day service
in the morning we always get tempted, assaulted I think is the word, not to honor dads because
you kind of feel because so many of those in our church don't have them, but we made
a decision we have to honor because we have so many good dads that God has raised up in
our church.
We have to tell people this is God's will.
He brings healing and so we preached on Sunday morning honoring our fathers, but on Sunday
night we did something a little different.
We did what we called a fatherless production.
We called it a Father's Day event and we crossed out the word father.
On the back of the leaflet we had all these pictures of youth and people saying my dad's
dead beat.
Speaking of the anger that they felt, we had that on the back.
I want to tell you the morning we're honoring what God has done teaching us how to be good
fathers and in the evening we had a service, a concert it was, we had testimonies, we had
a man in our church that stabbed his stepfather, had women, men speak music and we talked about
it and there was such a presence of God.
Visitors came, God saved, it was just you could feel.
So my prayer is God let our church, let your fatherhood be magnified.
God as we preach and as we serve let your fatherhood be manifest in our church services
and in our church that those that come in find safety.
Those that come in know what it's like now to be protected.
Know what it's like now to know they can go somewhere and someone will listen to them.
That they can go somewhere and find protection and provision.
That there's always someone that's got their back.
Oh God is a good God, a mighty God.
Hallelujah and I say to us the harvest is white and it's ready.
God bless you.
Thank you for listening to the P.H.S.A. Potter's House Salmon Arm podcast.
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