I am excited to announce my release of the long awaited and anticipated book – Josiah Generation Revival. The book comes out of many years of ministry to youth and children and a revelation that God desires to release a revival through the hearts and lives of children and youth. We have spent decades of spiritual currency on creating children’s and youth programs that have yielded a net return on investment in the negative towards the kingdom of God. Perhaps its time to rethink how we look at our children and youth. Perhaps we need to see that there is no junior Holy Spirit that is assigned to the children and youth while we grown-ups get to encounter the “real” God in the adult services. God is moving in the lives of children and youth, He has used children and youth through the centuries and He will use them today. We get to play a part.
Here is a small excerpt from the book to whet your appetite:
“We take our teens to church, we talk to them over dinner and we have discussions about their experiences at school or the sports team or cheer leading, all with the goal of reaching down into their lives and giving them a nugget that can help guide them through life and guide them closer to God. This has given us the same result year after year and season after season and is the very reason why we have statistics like the one quoted at the beginning of this chapter. And the sad part is not one of these things I just listed is a bad thing. Not one. They are excellent things. Tommy Tenney wrote in his book The God Chasers “God doesn’t care about your music, your midget steeples, and your flesh impressive buildings. Your church carpet doesn’t impress Him – He cloths the fields. God doesn’t really care about anything you can “do” for Him; He only cares about your answer to one question: ‘Do you want Me?’”[i]
We can find teachable moments and we can preach with great exegesis and knowledge. Our bible teaching can be the most theologically sound teaching that there ever was and miss it entirely. For the knowledge of God can make it to where we know a lot about God and never “know Him”. This is the defining moment in Josiah’s revival. It is the one thing that carries all the way through. A switch had been flipped from Josiah knowing about God and an encounter with Him that caused Josiah to forever become a seeker of God. Not a seeker of knowledge about God, not a seeker of the actions that God required. Obedience out of knowledge is an action driven from our heads. Our mind recognizes what God expects of us and we respond to that knowledge; obedience out of relationship is from the heart. This is a God seeker, or as Tommy Tenney puts it, a God Chaser.
Something happened to Josiah in those eight years from taking the throne to now being a God seeker. A switch was flipped, he went from being taught to seeking. I have seen this in some of the youth I have ministered to in the past but I have seen it most clearly as a father of my own children.”
Let me invite you to climb off the bench and to get in the game. There is a role you too can play in revival. Hop over to Amazon and pick up the book, find practical ways you can be involved in revival and jump in with both feet! For Kindle you can use this link: http://ow.ly/nO9y30l27fW and for Paperback you can use this link: http://ow.ly/nO9y30l27fW
Meanwhile I invite you to jump over and like the @josiahgenerationrevival Facebook page and my author page@ https://www.amazon.com/author/carlvanvliet
[i]The God Chasers; Tommy Tenney ISBN 0-7684-2016-4, pg 11