True Revival

When you stand before the Lord and say, "Lord, I need your power," you should be aware that a big temptation is going to come to test the power. If you ask one day, "Lord I need wisdom," then something is going to come along to test that wisdom. That happened to King Solomon. God met him and he asked God for wisdom. A few days later, two ladies came who were fighting over one son to test the wisdom of Solomon. He was thrust into a situation that required him to use that very wisdom He had asked God for. And that is a general principal.

When you ask God for something, you will be tried in that area. If you ask God for money today, tomorrow you will find a lot of poor people in your path. If you ask for the gift of healing, people will come to you at inopportune times wanting to be healed. In Africa, people frequently come at midnight knocking at the door. You need to understand that if you ask for healing, you may not have time to sleep because people will want you to minister healing to them.

So, whatever you ask from God, you have to deal with extra. Whatever you ask, you have to count with extra. You should understand the cost and be willing to embrace it before you ask, because God just might give you what you ask of Him.

I would like to talk about Jesus Himself, about His blood. What does this blood really mean to us?

I began to dwell on it, thinking about the light and thinking about reality. I found out that the world that we are living in is not too real. I found out that the world that we are going to one day is the real world. In the real world, the street is paved with gold, which never wears down or wears out. Things last in the real world. Our world is temporal. For instance, in our world, the road is paved by tar or asphalt. It wears out. After some number of days, it will need to be renewed. When we drive on it, we find a crack. And that means that it is not too real.

God is taking us to the real place. As we march forth to that real place, we need to sink in His blood. Look at Matthew 5:6: "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled."

If you want God to fill your life with all manner of blessings, you have to hunger and thirst for Him. This is the introduction for you. If you want His gifts and His power and His anointing, then hunger for him. If you want God to come and anoint your life as never before, be hungry for Him. This is not my opinion -- this is what Jesus told the people that came to hear Him when He was on the mountain.

Jesus felt that it was important for His followers to hunger and thirst for righteousness. One day a young man came to Him and called Him "Righteous Lord." He said, "Don't call me righteous Lord. The only one righteous is My Father in heaven." He was saying that we need to be thirsty for Him. We need to be hungry for Him.

I was born in a small village in Mozambique that was very far from towns and cities. In fact, it is 30 kilometers from the village where I was born to the nearest town. Most of the time, if we wanted to go into town from the village, we walked there. I had never ridden in a car until I was 15 years old. One day the Lord invited me to leave my family and my home to go follow Him. Do you know how I did that? I walked! Walking was the way I knew to get from one place to another. We did not have cars in the tiny village where I grew up.

I was born into the family of a witch doctor. At home, we didn't know about God, we only knew about witchcraft. I went to school in my village with the other boys until I was 15 years old. At that time, an audible voice came to me as I lay on my sleeping mat. It said, "Surpresa, move from your home. If you don't move, you die." I was shocked by the voice and did not know how to react to it. So I resisted the voice.

It came to me a second time and said, "Surpresa, you are not hearing Me. Move from your home." The second time the voice was so powerful that it shook the place where I was sleeping on the mat. I woke up and I took my schoolbooks and went to the house of my friend Gafari. I told him what happened that night. My friend Gafari said, "I will go with you wherever you go." He didn't say good-bye to his parents and I didn't say good-bye to my parents. So we started to walk from that place toward the North. We walked for over two weeks.

I won't tell you what we ate on the road, I will just say that it was not satisfying or filling. Life was very different in a rural African village than what you know here in the West. We slept along the roadside and there was no place to freshen up or to take a bath.

We finally arrived at the border and we ran into a man named Lucas. Lucas invited us to his house and he gave us water to drink, and he let us take a shower. Then he gave us food to eat and a place to sleep. I want to tell you, he gave us a good welcome. (One day you will welcome angels.) So we stayed in his house. He treated us nicely.

The next day he invited us to come and talk to him. Gafari and I sat down in front of him. Lucas started explaining about Jesus, a living king, a righteous holy of holies. He explained all about Jesus to us. As He talked about Jesus, I felt that my life was already in pieces near to Hell. I started crying. Lucas told me that there is a way. It was almost too easy to be a valid way -- all I needed to do was to confess with my mouth and believe in my heart and I can be saved completely. I decided that was an easy thing for me to do, so I did it. I gave to Him my life, my mind, everything. I handed everything over to His life. He said, "Thank you."

So, I looked to my friend, Gafari, and I asked him what he wanted to do. He said, "Oh, me too. I need this salvation. I don't have any assurance in the Moslem religion, what God is going to do for us." And then he also was led to the Lord.

After I gave myself to God, the Lord took me -- every part of me. Any time I slept, I dreamed of being in heaven. This was not an occasional thing, it happened constantly. I would dream of heaven at night when I slept and if I napped during the day, I dreamed of Heaven. This went on every day for three and a half years. If I slept during the day, the dream came: heaven. When I sleep at night, it came: I was in heaven. This happened all the time. One day I had a dream and people took me to the hospital because they thought I was sick. While I was having a vision, all my friends said, "Let's take him to the hospital."

It increased and I started dreaming while I was still awake. I would be walking along and suddenly I would find myself in a dream of Heaven. So I started to ask people about that: "What does this mean?" And the people said, "If you are dreaming awake, then this is a vision." I said, "Oh, praise God."

The fact is that I simply could not get enough of God once I committed my life to Him. The more I saw of Him, the more wonderful He was and the hungrier I became for Him. And that is the way it is supposed to be. We are to have a true hunger and passion for God.