The Revelation 16:15-16 | Episode # 1130

February 13, 2026

Hope Alive: Applying God’s Word to Your Daily Life

The Revelation 16:15-16

I am Chad Harrison, and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and had been serving as a pastor for 25 years. I'm also a practicing attorney. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word and find God's will for your life. The purpose of studying scripture is that you might know the character of Jesus Christ, and that you might see the world from the Father's perspective. That you gain wisdom that changes your life. I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open His word to you and allow you to see Him and to know Him. To know His will, that you might glorify Him and that you might walk in faith and power each day, especially today. In Jesus name.

If you would like to revisit today’s Bible study, please visit our website at https://hopealive.buzzsprout.com/ to download the transcript. 

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Transcript

This is Chad Harrison, and you're listening to Hope Applying God's word to your daily life.

Hi, this is Chad Harrison, and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and have been serving as a pastor for 25 years.

I'm also a practicing attorney. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word and find God's will for your life.

I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open up his word to you and allow you to see him and to know him and to know his will, that you might glorify him and that you might walk in faith and power each and every day,

especially today in Jesus name.

He says, behold, I'm coming as a thief.

Blessed is he who watches and keeps his garments.

Huh?

All right,

remember I told you I'm going to tie some things together. He's now mentioned Euphrates.

Now he's mentioned keeping your clothes on.

Okay?

Now he's not talking about just keep your clothes on.

He's talking about the rhema garments of the holiness that you get from being a child of God.

Okay? And what he's saying is, is remain holy. How do I remain holy? By what faith? Okay, you're not holy by anything you do. You're justified by faith. He says keep those garments on.

He says, be watchful. Be listening. Be listening to what,

huh?

The Holy Spirit? The word of God.

You're supposed to be listening to. You're supposed to be listening to God and being. Being watchful,

being, recognizing.

Listen and listen. I do that. I try to do that myself. You can ask Kathleen. I. I spend a lot of time in taking information,

in taking things that people are saying.

I'm trying to. I'm trying to measure them out by the word of God and see what's going on around. Around us. Because I don't want to be unaware.

I want to be watchful.

I want to know what's happening.

And I also don't want to be a person who just goes around telling folks what I think all the time.

I want to hold my pearls. I want to make sure that I give my. I'm going to give it to the people I pastor. I'm going to tell them. Tell you what I think about that.

But I'm not just going to run around telling everybody what I think about every situation.

I'm not going to do that. Why? Because many people can't. Can't handle it. And oftentimes, you ever been in a room and somebody started talking about spiritual stuff and everybody acted like they Pooted, you know what I'm saying?

It was just like. It was disgusting. You know, let's just get out of here. Have you ever done that? It's just totally in the whole. Whatever the atmosphere is. It was over with.

Have you ever. Have you ever been in that situation?

I'm going to tell you what happened. You decided to say something that was spiritual that the Holy Spirit didn't tell you to say.

Did you know that?

Yeah.

If the Holy Spirit had told you to say it, it would. Had a purpose and it would have. It would have hit where it was supposed to hit.

If you ever been a room with four people.

Listen, I want you to hear me. It's not sufficient to know.

Knowing is not sufficient.

You have to hear the Holy Spirit tell you when to say.

You got to listen to what the Holy Spirit says to you. And that's why I so focus on. And in this passage, that's why I've spent four or five weeks in five verse,

six verses.

Because hearing the voice of God is of ultimate importance.

So many Christians think I'm just supposed to go out there and just tell everybody,

just whatever I think,

I want you to hear me.

That's not what. That's not even the mandate of scripture. The Bible says that we're to preach the gospel to all creation.

All right, let's define that. Just like we break it down. It's. It. Listen, you're not supposed. God didn't just say, I'm gonna give you this stuff you don't think about.

You just go do it. He wants you to intake it. He wants you to. He wants you to soak it in. All right,

question. Just like we were dealing with genealogy and generation. Okay. All right.

When he says, preach the gospel to all creation,

are trees creation?

Are we supposed to preach to them?

What about dogs?

Well, you can practice on your dog because they'll look at you like they're listening. Okay? Like they understand. They'll look at you and laugh like it does make you feel good.

If you practice on your dog, I want to tell you, you can't redeem your dog.

All right,

now, on the other side,

and Ms. Diane's wrong about this,

all animals do go to heaven. Okay,

Just messing with her. That was an argument we had very early in our.

When we were talking. It's not a hill to die on, but they have souls.

So he's saying, what does this mean? Who is this person?

And Philip, he sits down and he explained. Not this Philip, another Philip. He sits down and he explains it to him.

And then that guy in the Ethiopian union, what does he say?

What's to keep me from being baptized?

Okay.

All right.

Notice he preached the gospel to a new creation.

That makes sense, doesn't it? Makes a lot of sense. So if I come in the room and I say, well, I've got a duty to tell you all this,

and it's the meeting of the Tallapoosa county atheists,

I'm going to tell you it's not going to go over well.

All right. But if one of them were to come to you and say, I've got this issue,

and you'll hear it. You can.

You can hear it.

You can hear it in the silence of the moment.

Sometimes the quiet voice of God saying,

tell him that.

And here's the cool thing. When you do it the right way, when you do it, when the Holy Spirit leads you to do.

Works every time because it is a divine appointment that God does.

Are you following me?

And that divine appointment? I love. I love my heritage and the people that I come from. But so many people say if I can just get them to do this, they'll go to heave.

And that is not true.

But I do need to be preaching the gospel to everybody that I perceive has an open heart to hear it.

And that might be somebody that is born again but is stuck in maybe Islam.

I remember one time I was on the streets and there was a bunch of tall women. It was in Florence, Alabama. I rarely went downtown, but for some reason, I was downtown that day, and I was walking the streets and a bunch of tall Arab women were walking toward me.

Now, if I run into a woman that's my height or more, I have to go talk to her, okay? Because they amaze me. All right. All right. And so I went up there, talked to them, and they were the University of North Alabama volleyball team,

and they were almost all Muslim, and they were almost all from Middle Eastern countries.

And I started talking to them and they said, you know, we're from there. I said, so y'. All. Are y' all Muslim? They said, sure, we're Muslim. And I said, well, I'm a Christian.

And they go, that's really cool. We, we, we, you know, we like Jesus. You know, they were trying to make small talking. I said, you do you like Jesus? They said, yeah, in fact.

In fact, he's. He's one of our prophets. I thought, man, that's great. There's one of yalls prophets. So y' all mean he's. He's somebody Important to y', all, right? He said, yeah, he's.

In fact, he's our second prophet. We believe he's coming back. I go, do you really. You really believe he's coming back, by the way? They all believe that. Okay, Did y' all know that they believe Jesus is coming back?

I said. I said. I said, do you know this? That. So Jesus is a prophet and he wouldn't lie to you, right? Do you know this? Jesus said, I'm the way, the truth and the life.

And no man goes to the Father except by me.

And all of them,

all of them sat there and looked at me and they go.

Finally the tallest one,

she said, I never heard that.

I said, that's the truth.

Jesus said, I'm the way, the truth and the life, meaning I'm the way in.

I am the wholeness of the truth of God, and I'm the source of life. And you can't get to the Heavenly Father except by Him.

Now what you think about that now? Don't you hear me? I didn't try to convert them right there on the streets of Florence, Alabama.

Sure I did.

But I knew one thing for sure when I said that. I saw that seed go in hard and deep.

And I also knew that they would be in the United States for a while if not for the rest of their lives,

and somebody else would come along later and water that seed, because that seed would have already taken root.

Right?

Okay, Do I know that all of them are redeemed? I don't know that, but I know some of them are. And, you know, I know some of them are because the Holy Spirit,

they fell under the conviction of the Holy Spirit. Mean, they fell under the. The. The. The.

The presentation of God that is made to each human heart by the Holy Spirit. They fell into it.

They fell and they didn't fight it.

Or more importantly, they didn't reject it as if it didn't exist.

See, a lost person that's not born again can't hear the voice of God.

And so when you say something like that,

you might as well have not said anything because they can't hear it.

But those who are born again, even if they don't know they're born again,

hear the voice of God.

They do.

And it may take years for them to finally repent and turn to him,

but they do.

So the enemy sells lies to the world all the time.

It's going to sell a huge lie so such that most of the people of the earth are going to come to the plains of Megiddo to fight some battle that they can't win.

Okay?

And yet I know that the spirit of God speaks to humans hearts all around me all the time.

And I know that the spirit of God is being poured out on all flesh all the time because God,

Or maybe act an act of kindness that I'm supposed to act or maybe maybe help in a way that I didn't know I could help.

I know that I take ground by doing that.

Okay, how many of you are so worried about someone,

you tell them about Jesus every time you see him?

Even when y' all are talking about the weather,

Some of you are. I know you are.

I got one chance. I'm telling them,

okay,

I will say this. A lot of Christians,

rather than waiting for the Holy Spirit to give you the opportunity,

a lot of Christians force Jesus on somebody rather than letting the Holy Spirit do his work.

Okay? Now I want you to hear me.

You ain't ruining anything.

You need to know this.

If they're born again, he's going to get them.

You following me?

The issue is, is that you're not going to get to experience it because you keep forcing things that the Holy Spirit's not doing.

And, boy, you know, that's a tough thing for even a pastor to say to a congregation because, you know, most of the time pastors,

his congregation out there tell, you know, let's just,

you know, let's just machine gun them all. You know what I'm saying? Let's just get out there in the community and machine gun as many folks as possible,

tell them all about Jesus.

How many of y' all heard that? How many of y' all felt like that was your job before?

Okay,

that's not how that works. The gospel is not a machine gun. It's not even a scatter gun.

It is a very precise rifle,

and it hits right in the right spot when it's really hard.

Anybody. I'm for him being the one,

right?

So I can trust him.

Even with the things that I think are impossible and I care about the most,

I can trust him with it.

Okay?

So many times people spend their lives worrying in fear and in doubt and not taking what God has given them. Their promises,

though I already knew.

He said, yeah, we believe into him. And before you know it, I get to say the one thing that a Muslim needs to hear and boom, it hit them like lightning.

And then I just left them there burning.

Just thinking about it. Jesus said,

and I've been told that Jesus is a great prophet. Jesus said,

I am the way, the truth and the life. No man goes to the Father but by me.

How do I. How do I square that circle?

How do I fix that in my own mind?

If Muhammad said Jesus was a prophet and that we should listen to him,

should I not listen to that?

And before you know it,

the door begins to open because he's the door.

That's the way it works.

Now, I am just a few minutes beyond my time.

Okay?

But I did have to go to preaching at the end. Right.

As you go today, I pray that the Lord will bless you and keep you, that he'll make his face to shine upon you, and that he will give you hope and peace today in Jesus name.