An excerpt from Michael L. Brown’s latest book: Seize the Moment: How to Fuel the Fires of Revival.

Revival is God’s work. It comes from the heavenly throne, not from human effort, and it comes with intensity. That is the very essence of revival: it is sovereign (in that we cannot schedule it or make it happen), and it is intense (in that it comes with force and power in order to bring about radical change). Just as the fire alarm is meant to wake people up and stir them to action, revival is meant to awaken sleeping believers, to alert the lost to their condition, and to fill the hungry and thirsty in dramatic and lasting ways.

If it’s not intense, it’s not revival. If it’s not overwhelming at times, it’s not a real outpouring. And if it doesn’t test your faith in God and your trust in the Spirit’s leadership, it’s not a real visitation.

This is not spiritual rocket science. It’s Revival 101. But this is where we often fail, wanting to conform the revival to our sensibilities, wanting to avoid the reproach of the unusual, wanting to avoid the fear of the unknown, wanting to keep things under our own control.

So, mark this down and never forget it: the moment you try to tame the revival, you end the revival. The moment you decide to quench the Spirit, the fire will go out. It may not happen at that very instant, but soon enough, there will be no doubt at all. You have put out the flames, and you cannot start them again. You have tried to take control and harness the Spirit. You have ended the move of God in your midst. We must be very careful here!

This chapter, “Never Try to Control the Spirit’s Work,” is an excerpt from Michael L. Brown, Seize the Moment: How to Fuel the Fires of Revival (Charisma House, 2024).

If you want an outpouring that you can turn on and turn off, then you don’t want a real outpouring. If you want a visitation that fits conveniently in your schedule, then you don’t want a real visitation. If you want a lovely home-and-garden type of revival, then you really don’t want revival at all.

Elsewhere in this book, I talk about the dangers of overwork (chapter 18) and about the importance of being conscious of the condition of your flock (chapter 17). I also warn about the dangers of getting caught up in weird doctrines and practices (chapter 7). It is important to find a sustainable pace if you’re experiencing a multimonth (or, even more, multiyear) revival. It is important to be wise stewards of the revival and to shepherd the move of God (see chapter 11). Demonic activity should not be tolerated. Fleshly responses should be gently corrected. Spiritual oversight is needed.

But all that is very different from trying to control or harness the Spirit. All that is very different from quenching the holy fires. Instead, we must wholeheartedly embrace what God is doing, no matter how challenging that may be (see chapter 19). We must fall on our faces and say, “Let God be God!” We must submit our programs and plans to the Lord’s programs and plans, in many cases scrapping our own entirely. More than ever, we must say, “Your will be done!”

Again, like everything else in this book, this is easier said than done, more easily theorized than realized. It’s like looking at an obstacle course thinking, “I can do this easily,” only to fall into the water after the very first hurdle. There’s a reason others fell into the water too.

Most of us who love the Holy Spirit would say, “Of course I would embrace everything He does.” But when He comes with suddenness (at the wrong time, in fact!), when He comes with intensity (this is a bit much!), and when He comes for a while (we’re ready to go home now!), that’s when the rubber meets the road. It’s one thing to pray and fast for revival. It’s another thing to welcome revival when it comes.

John Kilpatrick would be the first to tell you that he was somewhat of a control freak before the revival came. And although his church was technically Pentecostal, belonging to the Assemblies of God, he said you would not have known that if not for the sign in front of the building. Everything was under control.

But when revival came suddenly on Father’s Day 1995, Pastor Kilpatrick welcomed it, publicly and openly. He recognized that a holy river had swept into the building (he literally felt it and heard it), and he announced to his people, right there on Sunday morning, not in a back room at a midnight prayer service, “This is it. Revival’s here. Get in!”

This was a total shock to the congregation since he had never done anything like that before. He was always at the helm in total control. Yet now, he was flattened by the Spirit, lying there motionless, and this further sparked the faith of his people. They knew it was real!

Reflecting on what had happened, a perceptive leader said to me, “Pastor Kilpatrick’s desire for the glory of God overrode his desire to be in control.”

Exactly! It was more important to Pastor Kilpatrick to let God move and to experience the Spirit than to exert his fleshly control over what was happening, even if it took him out of his comfort zone. (Note this, too: If you’re not willing to be taken out of your comfort zone, don’t even bother praying for revival. Pray for yourself first!)

To be sure, in the years that followed, Pastor Kilpatrick became an excellent steward of revival and of his congregation. But, to repeat, we always knew that when God broke out in power and in unusual ways, he would get out of the way, as would Steve Hill, Lindell Cooley, and any others among us who were helping to lead.

In fact, some nights, right in the midst of joyful celebration, Lindell, the worship leader, would make a sudden turn, dramatically changing the direction of the meeting. Under normal circumstances, you would think to yourself, “That guy just quenched the Spirit!” But we knew Lindell too well. Instead, he was riding the wave of the Spirit, sensing the Lord had other plans. I remember we would turn to each other and say, “Let’s see where this goes.” And suddenly, the Lord would break out powerfully, with glorious, lasting results. To say it again, let God be God!

It is absolutely true that “the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets” (1 Cor. 14:32, NKJV), meaning you can decide to wait to deliver a prophetic message you have received, allowing someone else to speak first. It’s also true that everything must “be done decently and in order” (1 Cor. 14:26–33, 40, NKJV), meaning that when we gather together (say, in a house meeting), one person speaks in tongues, another interprets, another leads in a song, another prophesies.

But when the Spirit took over and changed our order, we went with the Spirit. When the Spirit’s plans were different from our own, we went with the Spirit—even if that meant skipping the offering that night (which was needed to pay the weekly bills) or shortening the message or eliminating planned testimonies or keeping us on our faces for protracted periods of time. All of us knew, to the core of our being, that revival was a sovereign work of the Spirit. In the holy fear of God, we knew that we could not get in the Spirit’s way.

PR

This chapter, “Never Try to Control the Spirit’s Work,” is an excerpt from Michael L. Brown, Seize the Moment: How to Fuel the Fires of Revival (Charisma House, 2024).

Gordon D. Fee, PhD (University of Southern California) was Professor Emeritus of New Testament Studies at Regent College in Vancouver, Canada.

Gordon D. Fee went home to be with the Lord on October 25, 2022.

As a Pentecostal scholar, Gordon Fee was both a pioneer and a role model, showing us that you could be academic and Spirit-filled at the same time. Not only so, but as the general editor of the prestigious New International Commentary on the New Testament, as well as author of the highly-acclaimed commentary on 1 Corinthians, he established a new benchmark for Pentecostals in the larger world of scholarship. Added to this was his brilliant writing on the Spirit’s presence and work, and his accomplishments were huge.

We know that the early Pentecostals were not only known for being non-scholarly. They were often anti-scholarly, and in the church where I came to faith in 1971, I sometimes heard the joke, “Seminary, cemetery.” And this was often true! For me, then, going to college and then grad school, there was a sense of having to choose either the things of the Spirit or solid academics, and I had to go through my own journey before soundly and simultaneously embracing both. But knowing that a man like Dr. Fee existed was of great encouragement to me. Although I never met him, he impacted me through his example and work.

Part of his legacy is that there are so many Pentecostal and charismatic biblical scholars and theologians today. May we continue to see the joining of the Word and the Spirit in our day.

Michael L. Brown, Ph.D.

See also: “Honoring Pentecostal Theologian Gordon Fee” by Rick Wadholm Jr.

Pneuma Review speaks with Dr. Michael Brown about his 2020 book Revolution.

PneumaReview.com: Revolution and revival are subjects that you have addressed in a number of your books. What experiences in your life birthed your passion for these things?

Dr. Michael Brown: Although I had been preaching the message of repentance since my first sermon in 1973, and although revival was a consuming theme in my life from the early 1980s, the revolution theme did not become prominent in my life until the late 1990s. To be sure, I had believed in the transforming power of the gospel, even on a national level, in particular during times of spiritual outpouring. And I had also believed that we were all called to lay our lives down for Jesus. But it was only while serving as a leader in the Brownsville Revival that these different themes coalesced around the concept of revolution.

Michael L. Brown, Revolution: An Urgent Call to Holy Uprising (Charisma House, 2020). Preview

As I explain in more depth in Revolution, it was in 1999, after speaking at a major rally in New Jersey, attended by thousands, that I went to my hotel room and decided to watch a documentary about the rise of religious fundamentalism worldwide, beginning in the late 1970s in Iran. Watching the footage from America as Ronald Reagan came to prominence, I was struck by a similar at a major Christian rally where the speaker sounded themes very similar to mine – except he spoke in 1979 and I was speaking in 1999. Yet things had only deteriorated morally in America since then.

At that moment, it struck me that something dramatic had to change, that more of the same would only produce more of the same, that we needed revolutionary change in our churches that would produce a revolutionary change in our society. And as I began to study revolutionary movements in history, trying to understand how cultural came about, for better or for worse, I began to see in a deeper light how revolutionary the words of Jesus really were, from His call to leave everything for His cause to His call to go and change the world with Him (better known as the Great Commission). That’s what led to the writing of this book.

PneumaReview.com: The title of your most recent book is Revolution: An Urgent Call to Holy Uprising. What prompted you to release this book at this time?

Brown: This is actually an updated, revised edition of the book Revolution: The Call to Holy War that came out in 2000 (this, of course, was before 9/11, and the “Holy War” subtitle was inspired by the students in our ministry school, who heard in terms of a gospel call to lay down our lives for a dying world).

Twenty years later, while speaking with editors from Charisma, one of them asked to see the book, after which he reached out to me, asking if I could work on an updated and revised edition to be released immediately. I felt deeply that this was the Lord’s will, since at that very moment, crowds were marching down our city streets proclaiming, “This is revolution!”

PneumaReview.com: Please describe the characteristics of the revolution that you are calling for in this book.

Brown: Throughout the book, I make very clear that this is a Jesus revolution, not a fleshly, violent revolution of intimidation and anger. It is a revolution based on conformity to the character of Jesus, based on obedience to His radical calling, based on the power of the Spirit, based on the upside down method of the cross. Talk about revolutionary concepts!

PneumaReview.com: What are some of the changes that will need to take place in the church before society at large can be changed?

Brown: We can’t just do church as usual, the same way many of us have been doing it for decades. We can’t go on with a spectator Christianity, where people gather together to watch (or, even participate in) a nice religious show. We need to reach the lost and make disciples. We need to produce true Jesus-followers who are joined to Him in loving obedience whether by life or by death. We need to ask how it is that the world has changed us rather than us changing the world. And then we need to be willing to make major changes – not just for the sake of change and certainly not just to be “relevant” – in order to raise up real revolutionaries.

PneumaReview.com: How important is it for the church to have an eternal perspective in order for this radical transformation to take place?

Brown: It is massively important to have that eternal perspective. That’s why I devote chapters in the book to the gods of this age, the gods of material and greed and addiction to sports and entertainment, the things that so deeply distract us, the things that put our whole focus on the here and now. Instead, we must live our lives in the light of eternity, illustrated powerfully in the book not just by stories of martyrdom, but by the theology of martyrdom. With that understanding, even we live to be 100 years old and are financially prosperous, we will live each day in light of forever.

PneumaReview.com: What can individual believers do in order to prepare themselves to be part of this revolution?

Brown: First and foremost, they make a fresh consecration of their lives to the Lord. They count the cost afresh, understanding how extreme the Lord’s demands are, but then they see that this is the path to a meaningful life: “Here I am, Lord! Send me, use me.” But this can only happen when we experience His goodness and grace and love afresh. Otherwise, it will be fear-based or behavior-based. That’s also why there’s an entire chapter in the book devoted to the subject of holiness – but again, this is not presented in legalistic terms but in liberational terms. Holiness to the Lord is the theme of our counterculture revolution.

In short, I would encourage everyone to read the words of Jesus and the apostles afresh and ask, “What if they really meant what they said?”

PneumaReview.com: How can pastors help prepare their people to be involved in this?

Brown: Pastors need to ask themselves what they are building and what they are producing. Certainly, it is impossible to please everyone, and there is more than enough burden on pastors and elders already. That being said, it’s all too easy for leaders to take the easy route, which is often the traditional route, just replicating what they’ve seen over the years, even if the model is not proving effective.

A constant prayer of mine is that, whatever it takes and whatever the cost or consequence, Jesus will be glorified in my life to the max. If we share that heart, I believe God will answer that prayer – and it is revolutionary indeed.

PR

PneumaReview.com had the opportunity to speak with two scholars about this move of God, each of them giving an interview. The first of these interviews was with Dr. Paul Palma. He has written a significant book called Italian American Pentecostalism and the Struggle for Religious Identity, published in August 2019. In this book, he has written about the Italian Pentecostal Movement in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The second interview is with Dr. Michael Brown. It may be a surprise to some but an Italian Pentecostal Church played an important role in his spiritual journey. We trust that you will find these interviews informative and inspiring.

PneumaReview.com: You were born into a Jewish family. How did you happen to go into an Italian Pentecostal Church?

Michael Brown: Because I was not a religious Jew, I got caught up in the whole counterculture revolution of the 1960s, playing drums in a rock band and becoming a heavy drug user. My two best friends and fellow bandmembers (and drug users) liked two girls whose uncle was an Italian Pentecostal pastor and whose dad had been praying for them for years.

When the girls started attending services there, my friends went with them, first just to hang out, then because the church fascinated them, both because it was Pentecostal and because the pastor was teaching about the end times. When my friends started to change, I went to the church in August 1971, to pull them out. I was sixteen at the time, and, as they say, the rest is history.

PneumaReview.com: How were you received by the people there?

It made such an impression on me that I said to my friends, “Fine, if this is the direction you want to go, I won’t fight you over it.”

Dr. Michael Brown speaks with Pneuma Review about his new book, Jezebel’s War With America. He urges believers to remember who we are in Jesus and take a stand against the spirit of the age.

PneumaReview.com: Please explain to our readers what you mean by Jezebel being at war with America when the historical figure, Jezebel, has been dead for thousands of years.

Michael Brown: We know that in the Bible there was a wicked Queen Jezebel, and she was incredibly powerful. She led the nation into idolatry. She emasculated her husband who was a strong King. She was associated with sexual immorality and with sorcery. She was a murderer, and she was obviously demonically empowered. Jesus called a woman “Jezebel” in the New Testament a thousand years later. This woman also was a false prophet; this false spirituality led people into idolatry and sexual immorality. The same demonic forces that worked through this queen 3,000 years ago and through this false prophet 2,000 years ago are working together in America today.

PneumaReview.com: What do you see as the primary signs that the spirit of Jezebel is at work in America?

Michael Brown: When we look at the state of the nation today, we see the rise of radical feminism and the emasculating of men. We see the rise of idolatry turning away from God, the rise of sexual immorality through porn and the Internet, the intense baby-killing fueling a militant abortion spirit. There are reports that we even have more witches today in America than Presbyterians. The same demonic power that works through Jezebel paralyzes people by fear. All these are clear signs that Jezebel is clearly at work in America.

PneumaReview.com: What are the main tactics that this spirit employs in order to accomplish its purposes?

Pneuma Review speaks with Dr. Michael L. Brown about his story, Playing With Holy Fire, and encouraging the biblical use of spiritual gifts.

PneumaReview.com: Briefly describe your own personal history in the Pentecostal/Charismatic church.

Michael Brown: The Lord saved me in an Italian Pentecostal church in Queens, New York in 1971. That was my first introduction to the gospel, and those dear believers helped pray me into the kingdom. I was an ungodly rebel, yet the Lord burdened them to pray for me, and their prayers were wonderfully answered. I surrendered to Him on December 17, 1971 and was filled with the Spirit and spoke in tongues on January 24, 1972.

Michael Brown in an earlier time.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I became somewhat skeptical of my Pentecostal roots, joining another church during that time while I went to grad school. But the evidence of Scripture was too strong in favor of the continuation of the gifts, and my life was dramatically impacted again in late 1982 when the Spirit got hold me and brought a fresh outpouring to our congregation. From that time on, I have primarily been in Pentecostal-Charismatic circles, although I work with believers from all segments of the Body.

A highlight of my life was serving as a leader in the Brownsville Revival from 1996-2000. That was a classical, repentance-based revival with full-blown Pentecostal elements.

PneumaReview.com: You have addressed errors in the Pentecostal/Charismatic church before. What prompted you to write a whole book devoted to the subject at this time?

Michael L. Brown, Playing With Holy Fire: A Wake-Up Call To the Pentecostal-Charismatic Church (Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, 2018), 224 pages, ISBN 9781629994987.
Read the review by Pastor John Lathrop.

Michael Brown: The last time I wrote an entire book focused on some of our shortcomings and abuses was 1991 (Whatever Happened to the Power of God: Is the Charismatic Church Slain in the Spirit or Down for the Count?). Since then, although I have often addressed issues in our midst, I have not devoted an entire book to the subject.

A few years back, Pastor John MacArthur launched a frontal assault on the Charismatic church with his Strange Fire book and conference (by the same name), yet I felt his criticisms were over the top, throwing out many healthy babies with some unhealthy bathwater, and in response, I wrote Authentic Fire. I also know that his criticisms would largely go unheard by those he most wanted to address. In fact, I believe his conference helped galvanize our movement in certain ways. [Editor’s note: PneumaReview.com covered the Strange Fire book release and conference including reviews by Craig S. Keener, Jon Ruthven, Charles Carrin, Eddie Hyatt, Monte Lee Rice, and Loren Sandford. PneumaReview.com also published reviews of Authentic Fire by William De Arteaga, John King, Daniel Snape, Loren Sandford, and former MacArthur disciple Rob Wilkerson.]