Do profits still exist? The answer to that and other questions on this edition of Key Light. Hi, I'm Mike Kellogg and you are now listening to Key Light, where you can find honest answers to honest questions about God's Word. Now, here is Steve. Thanks, Mike. And my pastor, Pete Alvonson, is in as usual on Friday. Good to see you. How you doing? I'm doing good. You get three free sins every time you do that. Man, you never told me that before. Yeah, well, you were so far behind. Pete Alvonson is my pastor and he comes in because of his wisdom, but also because at Key Life, we're pro-church. And Pete sits on the board of Key Life. He's very involved in this ministry. And thereby, we get a wonderful gift of Pete Alvonson, but we also get an opportunity to make a statement. It's so easy to say your pro-church. It's another thing to really be that. I've been in church recently, haven't I? Absolutely. Not for about two weeks, but I was suffering for Jesus in the mountains. But I preached when I was up. Oh, you preached a lot. By the way, Pete comes in to answer questions and we love to get your questions, but you've got to write them down. Send them to Key Life. Post Office Box 5,000, Made in Florida, 32794, or in Canada, Key Life Canada. Post Office Box 32150, Cambridge, Ontario in 3H5 in 3, or you can email us at Steve at keylife.org. And don't use the telephone number, 1-800-Key Life. For questions, you can make orders, get the magazine free, the tape free, the booklets free, make a contribution, but you've got to write your question down. And if you email us, be sure and give us your regular mailing address. Pete, why don't you lead us in prayer, and then we'll answer some of these questions. All right. Father, today we bow in your presence. And again, we're thankful today, Lord, that we belong to you. And we don't know the future. We don't know exactly what's going to happen to us tomorrow, or even the rest of today. But we do know you're in charge. And so we rest in the fact that you are sovereign, and loving, good, and patient, and merciful, and kind. You have a plan that includes us. And we just give you praise. Thank you for sending Jesus as our Savior, and that we belong to you and always will. And yet, Lord, we still have questions. And so we look forward to answering those today, and we pray that you would give us wisdom. We also look forward to worshiping you this weekend. And so we lift up our leaders who will be standing in front of us, teaching and leading in worship, our worship leaders and priests and pastors, teachers, pastors, families. Lord, we pray for them, the wives and the kids, as they are also on the front line of ministry. We pray you to pull them and give them grace to hear things sometimes that are difficult and to lead and to love. And now we just pray also for key life and pray that you continue to use this ministry to meet the needs of your people. And those that don't know Christ yet, throw them into the family. Be with Steve and use him in a powerful way. And now we commit this time to you as we do pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Peter's first question is from Ontario, Canada, did the prophets still exist? Now, are you a prophet here at key life? Very much so. So they still exist. You better watch out. I know. Actually, we've got to differentiate. There's an office of the prophet. And then there is the reality of prophecy and a biblical sense, which simply means speaking for God. I'm not so sure the office, though I'm not sure. I mean, do we have any prophets, aren't we? Not on our staff as far as I know. But that's kind of a formal thing. It's an office that Jesus fulfilled and the office that the prophets of the Bible fulfilled speaking the inerrant word of God. Now, that's one thing. Another thing, though, to be a prophet, to speak forth the word of God, makes you a prophet. Yeah, I think so. And I think that's, I agree on that. That's a very helpful differentiation, I think. There are a lot of believers today who do speak of so-and-so being a prophet in the church. And I think what they mean by that is that God is mediating a new or direct revelation through them to other people. God told me to tell you, for instance. So you have to be careful about stuff. And I think we would both agree that that office is probably not being given in the way that it was in the first century. I mean, can you... No, I agree. I agree, absolutely, with you. If I say you're a prophetic preacher, what does that mean? I think you're right. You're speaking forth the word of God. Prophets not only foretold the future, but spoke forth the word of God. In fact, I think if we were to take every line in the prophets of the Old Testament, we'd see that the prophets just spoke forth the word of God more than they foretold the future. That's true. That's true. And so in a prophetic way, it's both, but mostly just also speaking forth, guys, word. You know, when I was a liberal, just this side of WIPI, we used to talk of prophetic preaching as being preaching that dealt with controversial subjects, that irritated people that had to do with social ethics. Yeah, right. I guess there is that overtone in some areas of prophetic. In the sense that Amos said, let justice roll down like waters and righteousness, like an ever-formed string, the kind of thing that calls forth judgment and that sort of thing. It's sometimes called prophetic preaching. I agree. And you know, that is something that preachers ought to be doing today, too, in that sense. Standing in the gap and saying, this is wrong, and this is right. Yeah. You get stoned for doing that. Well, I'm no longer a pastor, man. I can run. You can't leave this sheep. I don't have any sheep. You saw me limping in. I asked Pete when he came to my study here at Key Life. I said, how you doing? He said, good, today. This is an email. I'm not sure whether this is a criticism or an actual question. You recently mentioned your hero being CS Lewis. Do you not consider Jesus your hero? Well, you must listen to what I say. I said, whenever you pick a hero, make sure your hero has been dead at least five years. So far as I know. He isn't dead. He's not providing fertilizer for flowers anyplace. He got out of the grave and walked around. So he's my friend and my king. And with George Bush, my hero, too. Well said. Okay. Let's see. This is from South Carolina. How can we tell true revival today? By what would such a revival be characterized? Have you ever read much of Jay Edwin or he's written? Yes. He's on that whole area of revival. Boy, that's a big question. What would you say are a couple of things that are crucial? I think that genuine revival is marked by repentance. A real, certainly the great awakening was. Certainly even the Jesus movement, the Evan Roberts revival. By the way, Richard Lovelace has written a lot on that too. Absolutely. And I think there's this sense of standing before a holy God, of repentance. And repentance is not changing necessarily. It's knowing you need to change, knowing what you've done, who God is, and telling him about it, and then the balls in his court and he begins to do a work. But I think the second thing that would have to do with a real revival would be what would happen in the church. Commitment of the church, involvement in the work of the church for the poor, for the, for missions. You know, you've seen as mother figures as a hawk, if you love Jesus. And then somebody has said, Ty, they feel of Jesus. That's right. If it was genuine, it would work itself out at work. That's right. That's right. What would you say? I think what I hear you saying, and I think it's true for my reading too, that a revival has sort of an inward and an outward response. When God's spirit is sort of moving through a culture, you see the church come alive, and you see the unconverted, get converted. Yeah. And some in the church that have been playing spiritual games, get converted for the first time. But then you see sort of a sweet in the culture with a lot of people that do become Christians. Oh, that's true. And so it's, yeah, repentance definitely. Well, and you see the evangelical awakening under the West reason, Whitfield, and that literally changed the course of human history in terms of compassion for the poor, ministries that reached out amid a difference in our culture in terms of literacy. Yeah. And so it really affected the culture. It really affected the culture. Absolutely. So in the Wells Revival, they had been one town in Wales. They had to fire the police because there was no need of the police force. Yeah. Because the culture had been transformed radically. Now I suspect they have police officers there today. But you've got to do it. God's got to do it pretty often because we're a bad boy. That's right. That's true. What can you do to call survival? I don't know if we could cause it. But I love Bill Brite and others who have called us to pray and fast and to earnestly seek God's face for that kind of a thing. And I remember meeting with when he first called that whole, you might have been there too. When he first called the people to prayer because I lived here in Orlando, I didn't have to fly here. So I went to it. Yeah. It was a delightful time of prayer and fasting and joining together in a green. And I got to do something. You know something too. I think that, you know, we have so many techniques for church growth and for change and for discipleship. I think almost always that. And I'm not throwing rocks at those things. I think those things are important. But I think it revivals when God does it and we don't. And it sometimes happens in funny places to funny people in funny ways. And I remember Jonathan Edwards' wife during the great awakening. She danced around the house and one time fell into the mashed potatoes. At the table. That sounded like the Jonathan Edwards who wrote sinners in the hands of an angry God. Okay. Is, oh man. Well, we got maybe, we got maybe a minute. I expect you to give a full exposition and answer to this question. This is from L.A. What is worship and how should it be carried out? Worship is a scribing praise and honor to the triumphant God, the only God. And how should it be carried out? Well, you know our nomination says there's got to be the singing of Psalms, the praise of God. Prayers and the reading and exposition of God's word. So those are sort of the bottom line issues that carry out of the sacraments. But it also is a life thing, you know, as we serve the Lord. It is a whole life of worship as we give ourselves to Him. Wow. It's not traditional or contemporary worship, is it? I mean, is it one style? True worship. You know, I love John frame when he spoke to our Presbyteria, which is our cleaviestical kind of thing. And John said that John says some very radical thing. He did. That's not even the issue. What we fight the worship over is not even an issue. Or should not be an issue. I mean, you can worship God with dance. You can worship God with contemporary music. We have to get out of it. I see you dancing at the back of the church last time. Probably. And I say we've got a dance out of here. And before we go, I must say key life is a listener supported production of key life network.