ARME 3: Leoni Meadows, CA - Aug 2010

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ARME Bible Camp

Don Mackintosh

Our Greatest Need

Father in heaven, we sang the song and we want that to happen this week at Army in our own lives.

I desire that in my life and I know you desire that in my life and in the lives here.

So we ask that to that end we could study together today.

Several weeks ago, I was attending the World Congress in, Where was that?

Atlanta, yeah, I've been a lot of different places recently.

And, you know, I had already arranged to speak on the second weekend of the general conference, not knowing who the general conference president would be or not knowing anything.

Have you ever been speaking and just wished that you were not speaking and that you were listening to someone else.

I mean, I don't often have that situation, you know, but I really just wished I was listening to Elder Wilson.

Well, right when I got done, we went to this house, and there were about 30 or 40 of us there, and we listened to the sermon right after the fact, and it was such a powerful sermon.

How many of you heard that sermon the second weekend?

Such a powerful sermon that we all just knelt down, and we asked the Lord to bring revival in our hearts.

And like I said the other night though, as I listened to it, I also was kind of like saying, yeah, this is such a blessing, this sermon is so great that I can see exactly how this person needs that message or the other person needs the message.

And I was like applying the message to other people.

You're just like applying, you go, man, I know that my wife needs to hear that, amen.

Oh brother, I know that my husband needs that.

And then I realized the message was really for no 1 else, it was for me.

And there was a quote that he started with there, and By the way, they told me here at Army, if I don't do this in a way where you're learning how to study the Bible, they'll never invite me back.

And I'm so terrified about that, that I just wanna try and do my best here.

But this statement really got my attention.

A revival of true godliness, from a book called Selected Messages, page 121, a revival of true godliness among us is the greatest and most urgent of all our needs.

And to seek this should be our first work.

The Lord does not now work to bring many souls into the truth because of church members who have never been converted and those who have backslidden.

Now how many think that's kind of a sobering statement?

So We have selected messages and testimonies, volume 6 that I just quoted.

When I thought about that, I began to search my heart and I said, it's me standing in the need of prayer.

And many times our study, our Bible study, will come out of a personal sense of need, yes or no?

And then I went back, and this is always a good thing to do.

I began to look up and I began to ask the Lord what I should study and I said, well it's revival I need to study so what did I do?

I looked up the word revival in, well on my computer, you can do that in your concordance.

And do you know how many times the word revival occurs in the Bible in terms of translated in the English word?

Aren't you just delighted when that happens?

I just finished a study on the heart, which I'll do some of that in the next hour here, but that was 800 and some words.

Man, that was a lot of words, right, to go through, but this 1 was like 16, and I was like, man, yes.

And some of those were just wonderful, powerful little Bible studies, like that dead child was revived by the prayer of Elijah in 1 Kings 17, 22.

And then that dead man who they buried, remember that?

And they put him in the tomb and he touched Elisha's bones and he revived and got out of the tomb.

How many would like to be at that funeral?

You're just like, whoa, oh man, you know?

That would have been something else, a revival of a dead man.

And then, you know, the revival that led to the reestablishment of the temple and the wall in Ezra, chapter 9 and verse 9.

So I looked at all these texts, but 1 text especially gripped me, and it is found in the middle of the Bible there in the Songbook section and I want to show it to you.

Now the Psalms, Psalm 85, so you might want to turn there.

The Psalms of course are divided into how many sections?

How many sections are the Psalms divided into?

And did you know that the Psalms were actually divided into sections?

They're actually divided into sections and they have 5 sections.

And those 5 sections are actually divided in such a way that those songs were supposed to go along with the first 5 books of the Bible.

So when you read Genesis, you had songs to go with it.

I mean, our pianist here, Jackie, would have loved it.

She's going, all right, let's do a little Exodus.

But she was actually mixing Exodus and several books together here this last time.

But anyway, so these were all mixed together.

So the Psalms would go with the different books of the Bible.

And of course the Pentateuch itself, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, the Pentateuch itself is divided in somewhat of a pyramid type scheme.

There's some type of a mountain development, if you will, where you can look at this point, this point, this point, and it goes right to the center.

And do you know what the center of the Pentateuch is?

And you know what chapter in the book of Leviticus is the center of the center of the center.

And Leviticus chapter 16, do you know what that chapter is about?

How many of you have heard of this before, the day of atonement?

The day of atonement, the day of atonement.

And guess what psalm, you probably figured it out now, guess what psalm was to be sung on that day?

Okay, maybe we need to sing that again, revive us again.

So this song that we're studying today is actually the middle of the middle of the middle and it was the psalm that was sung on the Day of Atonement.

And by the way, on the Day of Atonement, there were different so-called Halil Psalms that as you sang those psalms, you would go up 1 step and the next step and the next step and the priest would just move up higher and higher and higher.

And you know that little thing where it says, Selah, you know that means, of course, think about it, but it also means kick it up a notch.

And they would sing and then they would go up a half step, And they would be kicking it up a notch.

And when they got to the day of atonement, this was like the high point of the high point.

Well, let me tell you something about it.

There are different literary structures in the Bible.

When you're studying the Bible, you need to figure out what genre you're studying, you gotta figure out how it was built, what the author was trying to do, and did you know that this particular author, David, he would build some sometimes as acrostics, based on words or letters of the alphabet, like for instance Psalm 119, Aleph, Beth, Gemel, Dala, He, Wa, Zayin, you know all the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

He would go through those and that was the entire alphabet.

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Our Greatest Need

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