Whereas
the major part of Christendom
has moved, and is moving farther and farther
away from its original apostolic
model…
And whereas the
subtle and appealing forces of iniquity and apostasy will soon
reach their full paroxysm with the appearance of Antichrist,
only a RETURN to the standards of God as revealed in the Holy
Scriptures will guarantee the coming of a New Reformation
and Restoration within the Church.
The apostasy of
our day is first characterized by a psycho-social charismatism
dominated by unsanctified hearts and by the longings of the
flesh. This has prompted a search for sensual and emotional
experiences and spectacular demonstrations of the "power" and
the "glory" of God, dissociated from Christ and Him crucified.
This is the driving force, which is continually pushing the
Church towards a state of loadicean triumphalism based on experiential
subjectivism and a resurgent illuminism. This illuminism, born
of deceiving spirits distorts the Truth of the Holy Scriptures
to the benefit of misinterpretations that promote the desire
to fulfill felt needs as well as seeking "new revelations of
the Holy Spirit", instead of God's sole glory and holiness.
Secondly, post-Christian philosophy has subtly and gradually
misrepresented the evangelical message of the cross under the
influence of ecumenical and fundamentally humanistic thoughts
marked by doctrinal relativism, dead scholarship or intellectualism,
and a weakening of the moral standards and the eternal values
of the Kingdom of God which disaggregated into the immanence
of the temporal through a theology of evangelization by acculturation.
All this demonstrates that the Church today has sunk into conformism
to the world, with its mental framework and its humanistic socio-politico-cultural
message. This drift is being generated by the dual politico-religious
forces represented by Jezebel and Ahab which pave the way for
the arrival of the antichrist within a Christendom dominated
by a general drowsiness and a babylonian spirit of spiritual
prostitution and compromise.
A
Return to the Bible and the Message of the Calvary
The Revival which
we are longing for must consequently be a Biblical Revival
and a return to historical Christian faith; that is, a rebirth
of the great biblical doctrinal principles of the Protestant
Reformation under Luther and Calvin, among them, the plain
authority of the Scriptures in the believer’s life and justification
by faith (Ephesians 2:8,9). Only a genuine preaching of
the Word of God will revive the invaluable truths of the Holy
Spirit that modern apostasy and Post-Christian ideas have totally
undermined. In such a background, a return to the old paths
(Jeremiah 6:16; 18:15) of God's Written Revelation is a fundamental
need: "The Scriptures are,
for the Church as well as for each individual, the principle
of a spontaneous, permanent and daily reformation. As long as
it is regularly read and seriously applied, there is no ground
for sin to take root and for abuse to transform itself into
practice. Evil is immediately announced by so vigilant a guard,
and conscience, awakened
by its warnings, rises, protests,
condemns and reforms. God then does not need to judge us, because
we judge ourselves. But as soon as the Word is put under the
bushel, the darkness invades the house, whether it is the Church,
the family,
or the heart. Evil bursts; it is not distinguished. It grows;
it is not heeded. It reigns; one realizes it afterwards, and
everyone suffers from it; natural awareness of good and evil
ends up protesting. But it is too late! Evil, once established,
has become a Master; it thwarts the human efforts intended to
repress it. It is to late
to dam the torrent when it has
already left its bed and submerged the countryside."
(Frédéric Godet, Histoire de la Réformation
dans le Pays de Neuchâtel, 1859).
To preach salvation
is to preach CHRIST and HIM CRUCIFIED (1 Corinthians 1:23; 2:2),
the source of life for all men, thus placing back the Redemption
of mankind through the work of Jesus-Christ at the center of
God's purposes, which mightily affirms the attributes of the
Divinity: His Justice and His Holiness on one side, and His
Love and His Grace on the other. This preaching is a proclamation
to every heart of the glorious Good News of the God who "so
loved the world that He gave His Only begotten
Son so that whoever believes in
Him shall not perish but have eternal life" (John 3:16).
It draws the sinners to the precious fountain of life full of
the blood drawn from Emmanuel's veins, the precious
blood which washes all their
guilty stains and purifies their hearts. This preaching thus
completely shades today's many relativisms, making secondary
and futile man's innumerable concerns, in an age where the latter
has deified himself
to
so high a degree that he has
become his own center of attraction, his own reference. In other
words, man has created his own ways of deliverance whether they
are philosophical, moral, social, psychological or political,
or even religious. To preach salvation therefore amounts to
confronting the condition of the whole of
mankind, lost without Christ,
with the absolute need for repentance, as a starting point for
an inner transformation
and a new creation. Such a preaching destroys any universalistic
tendency of New Age religions, or antinomianism of a false Christianity.
It restores the absolute centrality of the work of Calvary in
the Christian experience, from the
justification of the condemned
sinner, to his regeneration and his complete deliverance from
sin. To preach salvation is to transmit the anguished cry of
the Father's heart who wants all sinners to be saved. "I
am a short-lived creature, going through life as a swallow in
the sky. I am a spirit coming from God and returning to God,
appearing one moment before disappearing into immutable eternity.
I only desire to know one single thing: the way to heaven. Give
me the Book of God! It contains all I need to know." -
John Wesley
To preach grace
is to hinder man's pride, his tendency to self-glorification
and self-worship, his legalism, his religiosity which praises
his works, his moral or intellectual skills, his knowledge,
his culture and his science. God's grace annihilates every thought,
every doctrine, every religion which, following the example
of Roman Catholicism, seek to usurp the place of God by establishing
man instead, with his own justice, his efforts, his magic performance,
his rites, his theological systems, his traditions and institutions.
Re-emphasizing that man can be saved but by grace is to affirm
that justification, regeneration and sanctification are the
sovereign and ultimate work of God by the power of the Holy
Spirit and that the flesh cannot gain at all divine favour.
Experiencing God's grace opens the locks of heaven both on the
repenting sinners and the saints, making them taste these heavenly
showers which come from the vastness of God's love manifested
in Christ. To return to grace as the only means of salvation
and Christian growth, will lead the hungry soul to intimately
know and experience God as the only source of life and godliness
(Titus 2:11,12).
To preach faith
brings all seeking and repenting hearts into the single way
which leads to Eternal Life: Jesus-Christ, the Lamb of God who
took away the sin of the world and offers forgiveness to whoever
entrusts Him without any restriction in a childlike faith. Faith
in Christ thrusts the believer into the perfect rest of God
and opens the way to a living and joyful, personal communion
with the God of all grace. Faith permanently re-actualizes the
experience of a living communion with God through a complete
abandonment to Christ. To preach faith in Christ is vigorously
opposed to the obliging attitude of the religious specialist
who imprisons doctrine in material or intellectual terms without
knowing the glorious and living experience of Him that is the
object of that very faith. Preaching faith consequently also
invalidates any attempt at spiritual advance proceeding of carnal
energies and methods: mysticism, asceticism, psychic emotions,
and experiences. It is to lay the foundation of an obeying confidence
in the written revelation of the One who has made all things
come into existence by His word and whose immutable promises
found their full expression in the Eternal Son (Hebrew 1:2).
This ultimately amounts to rejecting any justification by the
law or works (Galatians 5:4). Faith totally embraces Christ
in a union, which leads to holiness.
A Return to Holiness and
Sanctification
But the ultimate
God-promised Revival should not stop at the tides of the 16th
century Reformation lest it should enthrone
itself in the form of another
theological system made up of dead creeds and dogmas imprisoning
the Spirit of God in an intellectualism and a mental belief
which replace a personal and living faith, and in sterile doctrinal
orthodoxy dislodging the powerful truth of the Word of God revived
by the experience of grace. Sundar Singh once defined the pitfall
to be avoided as follows: "I
do not condemn theological science, nor all the theologians
of which several are saints. I am not opposed to
studies, but without the life they
darken spiritual vision. A theology void of prayer is a fountain
without water. I have learned many useful things in my studies,
but the teaching of the Spirit that
I received, I
received at the feet of the Master."
The ultimate awakening has at its disposal the vast sea of entire
sanctification and holiness in Christ, which was
lived in pietistic movements of the 17th and 18th
centuries (the Holiness movement resulting from the Moravians,
and the Methodist
awakening under the influence
of John Wesley). Refreshing herself at the historical sources
of these great outpourings of grace, the Church must return
to the freshness of an anointed life of prayer and of her passion
for the lost, which will manifest itself through the evangelization
of the crowds and the poor, and an expansive missionary activity.
This second great historical Reformation that the Methodist
Revival has been teaches us that, "the
goal of Scripture is an intensely personal love for Jesus possessing
your whole being. The goal of redemption is your love relationship,
your love life with Jesus. Christian living is living in love
with Jesus. Prayer communion is looking lovingly into Jesus'
eyes, thrilling to Jesus' voice, resting in Jesus' arms." -
Wesley L Duewel.
A Return to the Power
of the Holy Spirit
To achieve all
this work in obedience to the Great Commission of the Lord Jesus
for the Church to make disciples of all the nations, in an unfavourable
environment which is vigorously opposed to the Gospel more than
at any other time throughout history, will lead the Church to
experience the supernatural and miraculous power of the Holy
Spirit. And it is there that the New Reformation will have to
follow the tracks of the Pentecostal movement of the beginning
of the 20th century, which again gave liberty to
the Holy Ghost, His gifts, and brought back a quickening heart
religion, and renewed the Church in purity of heart and the
holiness of her first love. The Spirit of God will again inspire
a specific hymnology which, as in the Welsh Revival of 1904,
will exalt and lift up the Lamb alone in heavenly worship, because
the Spirit of God merely seeks to glorify Jesus-Christ as the
Lord of all hearts (John 16:4) - the Comforter sent by the Father
has only one mission: to baptize with divine fire, purify, sanctify
and lead the children of God in all truth in order to bring
them to perfection, enabled then to reflect the beloved Son
and to accomplish the same works as He did and even greater
ones (John 14:12).
A Return to Universal
Priesthood and the New Testament Church
Lastly, the fourth
part of that Restoration must coincide with a rediscovery of
universal priesthood by which each and every child of
God will return to the full communion with Christ and will enjoy
his identity as priest in the body. The vocation of the Church
indeed is to build, strengthen, and reproduce individuals, living
stones in the image of Christ through a growth in the knowledge
of the Savior. This watchword will re-center the Church on Christ,
the true Head, rather than on the denominational, local church
as a building, or on a class of ministries. It is in a near
future that the deflagration allowed by God as a redeeming judgment
will fall on man-made institutional temples, through chaotic
times and inescapable persecutions. Those will bring the Church
back to the original divine intention according to the model
of only one Church per city as during the first 300 years of
her history. It is the only organic framework where the whole
body can operate harmoniously in unity as living cells eager
to be individually and corporately edified in all its parts
until it attains the perfect stature of Christ.
Elijah's Anointing
The preceding point
coincides with a fifth and last point which arises from a need
to return to the family life and pattern, as the basic cell
of the Church, and comes from the promise of the Father to "turn
the heart of the fathers to the children and the heart of the
children to their fathers" (Malachi
4:6). Indeed God desires to restore fatherhood in all
its dimensions, first by revealing Himself as a Father
to a generation having reaped the bitter fruit of an increasingly
sharp rebellion against Him and the fathers; then, by bringing
the Church back to her roots: not only the faith of the saints
and the martyrs of the apostolic Church, but also the chosen
people, Israel. This return to the full revelation of
the redeemed Body of Christ forming a solid assembly joined
together as one soul is the last development of divine Restoration
that no other generation has known. Truly, the four preceding
pillars, return to the Word of God and the central truth of
justification by grace alone by means of faith, return to sanctification
and godliness with the requirement to form the Christian character
and behavior, return to the power of the Spirit and His miraculous
gifts, return to universal priesthood by the means of the New
Testament house Church, all these already supported the House
of God in the time of the apostles of the first Pentecost and
have appeared in a more or less large extent in all renewal
movements, although they were however emphasized in a distinct
way by the Spirit, through a continued revelation throughout
history. The Last Days' Great Reformation will join together
these four characteristics with Elijah's anointing which will
gather all the children of God for them to become the Bride
prepared to meet her heavenly Bridegroom, Jesus-Christ, returning
in glory, thus joining together all things into Himself. One
remarkable characteristic of the prophetic Spirit is to initiate
a return to Jesus-Christ, the Alpha and the Omega, so that Christ
be ALL in ALL. "And I,
if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself."
(John 12:32). Thus,
the New Reformation which we are longing and praying for can
be boiled down to one watchword: TO LOVE Jesus-Christ! Let
us yield ourselves to the Father's call and plunge into His
inexhaustible river of Grace. As count Zinzendorf who formerly
played a paramount role in that invaluable Moravian renewal
which revived the passion for Christ within the Church, we wish
to proclaim salvation in the following way:
"To point
out to every heart the loving Lamb, who died for us; to never,
either in discourse or in argument, to digress even for a quarter
of an hour from the loving Lamb; to name no virtue except in
Him, and from Him and on His account; to preach no commandment
except faith in Him; no other justification but that He atoned
for us; no other sanctification but the privilege to sin no
more; no other happiness but to be near Him, to think of Him
and do His pleasure; no other self denial but to be deprived
of Him and His blessings; no other calamity but to displease
Him; no other life but in Him."
Being
aware of the gravity of the times we live in, we seek to sound
the trumpet in order to send out a prophetic call TO WATCH and
PRAY, so as to stir in the people of God a renewed ZEAL for
a diligent and sincere pursuit of the Lord, and a HUNGER and
a THIRST for a fresh and mighty outpouring of the Holy Ghost.
The
purpose of "The Nehemiah's Prayer Watch" is to promote a
New Reformation by calling the Church to a lifestyle characterized
by fervent prayer and preparation to a revival of Apostolic
Christianity. Our strategy is summarized with three essential
axes:
- To publish stirring messages,
articles and books in order to communicate the HOPE and the
VISION of a true Christ-centered visitation of God, which
we believe to be imminent.
- To instruct the disciples into
the TRUTH of God, with a particular emphasis on the biblical
principles of PRAYER and REVIVAL, in order to bring them back
to a GODLY and HOLY life immersed
into the WORD OF GOD and
lived in the full FREEDOM of Christ.
- To multiply and strengthen PRAYER
GROUPS making them autonomous, responsible and mature through
seminars and CHAINS of PRAYER in
order to pave the way to the New Testament home Church.
The
Web site of "The Nehemiah's Prayer Watch" was open in April
2004, as a foundation of the prayer ministry of ERM (Ensemble
Rebâtissons la Maison). "The Nehemiah's Prayer Watch"
constitutes the increased French version of the Anglophone Web
site The Watchword designed by David Smithers (United
States). It intends to be a gift for the Church; its existence
testifies that we are willing to make the French Church benefit
from spiritual jewels usually confined within the Anglo-Saxon
world. "The Nehemiah's Prayer Watch", by propagating writings
on revival, holiness, and prayer, originating from revivalists
and great men of God of the past, seeks to kindle the revival
flames in the heart of the French-speaking Church and the French
Church in particular. Hence, since September 2001, the ministry
"The Nehemiah's Prayer Watch" has been regularly translating
from English short articles and historical extracts of writings
emanating from eminent revival men or holiness preachers, which
clearly define the unchanging principles of God related to prayer
and revival. A range of classic works on revival is also in
the process of being translated and will be propagated completely
and freely in electronic version on this Web site. The selected
authors were not
selected on the basis of a
particular theological point of view, but rather because of
their deep spiritual insight in connection with the basic principles
of prayer and revival.
Shouldn't we long,
with a burning desire and a deep sorrow, to see God acting in
our own generation in revival power just as in the time of the
Reformation? Can we, indeed, as the people of God, continue
to neglect, without any burden and heartache, to take possession
of the spiritual heritage of the French-speaking Church which
has produced remarkable heroes of faith: Farel, Calvin, Théodore
de Bèze, Pierre Valdo, Lefèvre d' Etaples, Olivétan,
etc.?
Since the Reformation,
all the movements ignited by the Spirit of God have always been
violently fought against in France by the forces of evil, through
severe persecutions. While the Anglo-Saxon Church has been swept
many times throughout history by waves of Grace, and these Great
Awakenings have produced godly and devoted men of prayer who
left to the following generations, by their rich writings, eternal
seeds of Divine Blessing, France embraced Voltaire's ideas to
enter the way of revolutions, thus closing the door to full
Divine Presence for many centuries. Two different destinies
have since separated the Anglo-Saxon world (the United States
more particularly) and Europe with France in the center: in
the former, the reality of the Kingdom of God and faith in God
(certainly in a large extent apostatized today), and in the
latter, the construction of the Antichrist's empire underpinned
by a flood of ideas and tinted thoughts made up of irreligion,
rebellion and skepticism mingled to an official constantinian
religion which is reappearing today as an instrument of social
peace and security and is deceiving many of the elect. But
where sin abounds, grace abounds much more!
"Why did not France
have her Wesley? Why, on the old
trunk of the huguenot reformation, one did not see an apostle
emerging, leading hearts in the ways of a second reformation?
The Church of the martyrs which produced Claude Brousson and
Paul Rabaut, Antoine Court and Pierre Corteiz, those contemporaries
of Wesley, apparently was a rather fertile ground
to give birth to a French Wesley
(…). However, since it
did not take place in the past,
the future may reserve it. "The great servants of God, professor
Edouard Sayous once said, are not the property and the secrecy
of England. God can make them emerge where He wants. He can
give the French society a French Wesley. Oh! may he come, and,
whatever the name of his Church, may he be blessed." " (Matthieu
Lelièvre, "John Wesley, His Life and His Work").
ERM
(Rebuilding the House Together) was founded for the purpose
of reviving and reproducing the expression of a true Christ-centered
Christianity. The work originated in an intense longing for
revival. That holy longing began to grip our souls in the early
1990's with a hunger for God and His fullness ignited by the
Religious Revivals by Charles Finney. That longing has been
increased with years of the desert experience, and was finally
consolidated thanks to the discovery of the articles of The
Watchword. Because of a growing dissatisfaction due to the
status quo in the Church characterized by an absence of contrition
and baptism of wailing resulting from intense prayer, ERM
seeks to communicate the fresh divine vision of the "rebuilding
of the wall" as described in Nehemiah's book as a timeless model
of a revival sent from heaven.
ERM also
owes its identity to the determining influence of spiritual
giants such as Charles Finney, James Hudson Taylor, E.M. Bounds,
A.W. Tozer, Leonard Ravenhill, and David Wilkerson, - and on
the French side, Pierre Truschel, now in glory, only to name
some of them. Those have been for us models of faith, holiness,
and zeal, devoid of compromising, whose writings were like dew
coming from heaven on a dry ground. "The Nehemiah's Prayer Watch"
represents part of the resources that ERM places at the
disposal of the French-speaking people of God to achieve the
goals mentioned above. The other resources remain however held
to the participating members of ERM's vision.
We are finally indebted
to the European Prophetic College (EPC) led by
Brother Lars for the depth of the prophetic insight which it
practices and which has trained us in a better understanding
of God's ways according to the glorious and inimitable truth
of Christ's Gospel. This man of God began his ministry in the
70's with David Wilkerson within Teen Challenge, then started
the international ministry of prayer of the EPC and Intercessors
Network in the 80's, just to finally make himself available
for a specific
call for France, made clear
in late 2003 after much time
spent in silence and tears since 1997.
In practice, we
are committed to give preeminence to the Lord Jesus-Christ in
our corporate meetings, our families and our individual lives,
by fervent prayer and obedience to God in love, in order to
confirm in a visible way that Christ only is King and the Savior
of the world.
Back
Home
| Authors | Biographies
| Topics | Revivals
| Books/audio/CD |
Links | Translation |
Prayer watch |
Vision & History |
Revial Seminars | Contacting
us Copyright
© 2003. Ensemble Rebâtissons la Maison. |