This episode (part 1 of 2) discusses the seven mountains of culture, a concept first shared by Youth With a Mission founder Loren Cunningham — Arts & Entertainment, Business, School, Family, Government, Media, and the Church — and how Christians can apply our God-given authority, favor, and wisdom to affect change in these spheres. This sermon by Joe McIntyre was recorded more than 10 years ago but is perhaps even more relevant today.

Islam has done a good job infiltrating these spheres and it’s time for Christians to rise up collectively and become active, awake and informed. We need to gain vision for affecting culture within our individual spheres of influence. But spoiler alert: affecting culture starts with serving, not being a bull in a china shop, and thinking beyond revival to reformation.This episode will give you big-picture vision as a church and inspiration to apply in your personal life.

Mentioned In This Episode

Sharam Hadian
Loren Cunningham
Marketing of Evil – by David Kupelian
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
William Wileberforce
Bill Bright Campus Crusade for Christ
John C. Maxwell
Cal Pierce
Lance Wallnau
Reinhard Bonkke

Full Transcript

Imagine that you were an Israelite. And you were in the wilderness. And all of a sudden, Moses said, “Okay, it’s time for you to go in and spy out the land.” And so you’re among this company of twelve to go in to spy out the land, and then they see the enormity of the giants. Well, some of them were just overcome by fear and intimidation. But two of them said, “Well, if God delights in us, they’re bread for us. And the fear of us is on them.” That’s the perspective I’d like us to take hold of as we look at God’s plan to have the church rise up and take back our country.

I mentioned to you that after a Shahram was was with us the last time I was praying, I think it was the following Monday, and the Lord just started opening this thing up to me about the effectiveness of any ungodly organization contrary to the will of God, if they meet certain conditions. And what he did is, he opened up Genesis chapter 11, where it’s talking about the Tower of Babel. And it says that they had a communication system, they had a goal. They had all these attributes, and God himself said, “Now, nothing can be withheld from them.” So what God did was he sent confusion into their ranks, and they were unable to accomplish their goals.

I wonder if the church prayed, if God might send confusion into the ranks. I’ll tell you an illustration. Years ago, we have been on the mailing list for intercessors for America for many years. And one month I remember their emphasis was on praying against the drug cartels coming in from, bringing in drugs from Mexico. So we prayed. Well, the next month, a newspaper reported that in Arizona, they found a van by the side of the road that was absolutely filled with millions of dollars worth of cocaine. And they said in the article, well, somehow there must have been a communication breakdown because whoever was supposed to get that didn’t get it.

Well, that’s to encourage us that what if we prayed? And actually, actually, we have to move out of, I don’t want to say this incorrectly, but sometimes we have to move beyond petition to using our spiritual authority. Jesus said, Whatever we bind on earth will be bound, whatever we loose on earth will be loosed. So what if we were loosing a spirit of confusion on Islam and its plans in America? What If the Church began to do that with authority? Well, I believe it would have a dramatic effect, because communication is what makes it work. But what if wegot the church to move into agreement? What an idea! I know that’s as radical as Islam.

But when I was praying about this meeting today, the Lord brought to mind a scripture from Isaiah 59, you don’t need to turn to it. But it says so they shall fear the name of the Lord from the West, and His glory from the rising of the sun. When the enemy comes in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord will lift up a standard against him. But we have to become informed and understand what God would have us do. Because, I want to say something that might sound just downright almost unChristian. Prayer alone isn’t going to do it. You see, the church has to become active, awake and informed.

And one of the things that we deal with, perhaps Shahram you’ve run into this, says that some believers have a Christian fatalism. That is that it’s inevitable that evil rises and that the church declines. And they think that fits their theology. But the Bible says when when darkness covers the earth, and the face, it’s Isaiah 60, but it says, darkness will cover the earth and great darkness the peoples, my light will rise upon you, and my glory will be seen upon you. Well, so you say, “Well, darkness is coming.” Well, maybe it’s time for the light to rise. See what I mean? We have promises from God.

The other promise that came to mind, and so that I don’t misquote it, I’m going to read it. But it’s in Isaiah chapter two. And it says, In the last days, the mountain of the Lord’s house will be established. And the law will come forth from that mountain. And see, what we have to do is we have to have a biblical basis. You know, social involvement is a great idea, but you can do it in the natural. But what I want to talk with you about in this session is that God’s got a plan for this. And that these callings, I think 20 years ago, someone like Shahram entering into politics, you’d say, “Well, good luck.” Because “You know, politics, that’s so evil.” But now the church is starting to realize that the lack of putting Christians in office is resulting in what we have today. So we want to see godly candidates, fully supported by the church, and we’ve got to wake the church up to be responsible. It’s pathetic that Christians don’t even vote. See, we really to shape up here.

All right, I want to share something, as I put in the the flyer that God’s plan was revealed to a couple of spiritual leaders in 1975. If we’d been doing what God revealed to these leaders, that the church should do, Islam would be making no progress today. But we haven’t done it. Because I think there’s a lot of reasons for that complacency. The Laodicean spirit, and many other things have affected the church negatively. But do you remember that Jesus speaking to the Laodiceans through John, he said, you know, Repent, be zealous and repent. And he that overcomes I will grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I have overcome and sat down with my Father in His throne. Now, one of the tendencies we have is to say, well, won’t that be wonderful in the next stage will get to sit with Jesus in His throne. I don’t think he was talking about the next age. I think he was talking about partaking of his authority in this age. Because Paul says in Ephesians, that we’ve been made alive, raised up and seated with Christ in heavenly places now.

So we are called to partake of the authority of the throne. And that’s why we need to wake up to our authority. But not just wake up to our authority in the sense of, we have authority and prayer. But realize that as God calls us into our culture, there’s an anointing, there is a manifestation of light and glory that we can bring into the culture. And instead of retreating from our culture, we need to move into our culture. How many have not ever heard about the seven mountain vision? Does that ring a bell to everybody? Seven mountain vision. Most of you have your hands, so how many of you wouldn’t raise your hands no matter what I asked you. “I’ve been to church before I know how this works.”

The story goes that Loren Cunningham, the founder of youth, with a mission, was vacationing in Colorado in 1975. And he got up in the morning and he was praying to the Lord and the Lord said, “If you want to affect the world, if you want to accomplish world evangelism, you need to invade the seven mountains of culture or the seven mind molders.” And he gave him a list of these seven things. I’ll give you the list here and then I’ll finish the story but he said, arts and entertainment, sports, whatever is celebrated in a culture that that needs to be invaded. Have you noticed of how effective it is when a major athlete testifies to Jesus, and what influence that has? Well, that’s moving into that mountain. Business world, and this is the one, you see Islam understands that it takes money to do stuff. And so they are very committed to financially supporting the process of re educating everybody.

Well, what if the church was awake? And they were giving? What If the Church actually tithed? We’d have millions of dollars, probably billions of dollars, to give to whatever God’s doing around the world, and in our nation, and to support godly projects throughout our culture. But a lot of things are underfunded. They’re not undermanned, they’re underfunded. What if Christians had a Dominion vision in the business realm, and they went in there thinking, I’m here called by God, to make money so that God’s purposes in the earth can go forward, because I’m able to give generously to whatever God is involved in? Well, the good news is that vision is rising in the church.

The third area is the area of education. Do you know, I really didn’t want my daughter to go into a school to find out how Sally had two moms? That was not my idea of good quality education. Cultural reshaping is more like what our education has become. And you know, sometimes people have said, “Well, that’s why we need Christian schools.” Christian schools are a really good thing. But when we give up the public schools to the pagans, they paganize the public schools. And that’s why Islam goes in and to get on the school board first thing. I mean, they’ve become influential so that their perspective has a voice in education.

And we kind of are so used to being America being a Christian country, it doesn’t occur to us that we have to defend or work to influence our culture. But if anything oughta prove that the last 20 years ought to have proved that we need to do something. I’m reading a book, I think the title is the Marketing of Evil. And it’s talking about the various ways different groups are infiltrating their philosophies into our culture. And one of them that was discussed was how homosexuality has gone from being a homosexual, being a recognized aberration, a perversion to now being gay. And how a couple of Harvard students who were gay, developed a whole game plan for the gay movement to reshape America’s opinion of homosexuality. In the article, it listed the title of the book, and how they systematically have used our kindness as a people to make us feel guilty about not blessing and receiving them. And it was systematic, methodical, and they got into agreement on it, and it was well funded. And they’re probably 3% of the culture. But they reached the tipping point where they are now influencing education. But the other thing that you find out if you study any of that is that they’re highly well funded, because very rich, gay people give abundance of money to the cause.

What’s the point? Well, if a small percentage of gays can reshape our culture, what could a church awake do? We know what a church asleep can do. We’re witnessing that, aren’t we? But if we see the people of God all of a sudden say, “You know.” I’ll tell you something that happened to me recently. I was had an afternoon where Pam was off doing something extremely important, I’m sure, and and so I decided to go on Netflix and watch something. While I saw they had a documentary biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Do you know who he is? Bonhoeffer was a German pastor who stood up against the Nazis and was martyred for his faith. And something grabbed me that was significant about the story that I didn’t have any knowledge about. But he came to the US and taught at a college here, a university. And while he was here, he came in contact with some of the black churches. Now, the black churches different than the white churches in America, have always mixed social responsibility with their faith. And he came here and started interacting with the black leaders in the church. And it reshaped his view of Christian responsibility. That’s what he took back to Germany, that ended up in having him martyred. Because he realized it was the Christians responsibility to stand up for righteousness in every area of life. And as you know, he ended up being put to death for his faith. And for his stand against the Nazi regime. Well, his was kind of too late to stop what was happening. In my humble opinion, we’re not too late. And we are the majority if we we’re just the informed activated majority.

The other areas are family, and Shahram shared about what would happen if you ladies were married to a Muslim, and what that would do to your ability, to your worth. And, I mean, you don’t want what they have to offer. And it’s shocking to think about the naive Western women that marry a muslim and then find out what they got in for. It’s a shock.

Government, of course, is something we’ve been talking about. They’re hard at work to be influential in the government. But we have some godly people being raised up, that have a heart to stand up against unrighteousness and the flood of it that’s invaded our culture. Not just from the attempts of the Muslims, but the whole socialistic government mandated control of everything. Concepts that are that are being promoted so vigorously. And we want to see godly candidates raised up. But you know, I’ve been involved in the prayer movement for probably 25 years. And I don’t think until recently we understood how key it is to develop intercessory teams to backup political candidates, our folks that are in education, people in media, those who are in… Do you realize how cultural shaping Hollywood is? Where do our kids learn their values? But what if more and more godly people began to invade that part of the culture? How many of you have seen the movie Amazing Grace?

Have you seen the story of the, his name is escaping me? Wilberforce. Wilberforce almost single handedly inspired the ceasing of slavery in Great Britain. Which an amazing thing was pointed out as I was hearing somebody share about this. Because he invaded the mountain of government, they had slavery ended peacefully. Because we didn’t it cost 500,000 lives or something like that, to end slavery. Because we didn’t have godly men go into government and and advocate for that and bring the the influence necessary to get the laws changed, it cost lives. That’s a sobering thought, isn’t it? But it ought to be an inspiring thought. Because if you hear somebody who names the name of Jesus is running for government, put them on your prayer list, start to intercede for them.

I don’t want to get ahead of myself but media and the church is, are the other of the seven mountains. So I’ll say them quickly, arts and entertainment, business, education, family, government, media, and the church mountain, religion mountain. And if you think about it, many of the groups are using our freedoms against us. And we really need to stand up as the church. But when Cunningham was in Colorado, getting this list from the Lord, he got really excited. And he thought it was really a powerful thing. Here’s what he said. He said, “My family and I were up in a little cabin in Colorado. And the Lord had given me that day a list of things I’d never thought about before.” He said, “This is the way to reach America and nations for God.” He said, “You have to see them like classrooms or like places that were already there and go into them with those who are already working in those areas. I call them, (this is Cunningham talking), I call them mind molders, or spheres. I got the word spheres from Second Corinthians 10, where Paul speaks in the New American Standard Bible about the spheres that he had been called into. And with these spheres, there were seven of them.

He’s thinking this thing through that the Lord has shown him, and and then he gets a call. And it’s somebody telling him that Bill Bright, the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, is in the area, would he like to go to lunch. So they go to lunch. And Loren’s really excited because the Lord says, “Tell bill about this.” So he tells him, he says, “This is the list the Lord gave me.” Well, Bill Bright reaches into his pocket and pulls out the almost identical list and says, “This is just what the Lord told me.” In the mouth of two or three witnesses, let every word be established. And I was reading elsewhere, where Cunningham, they’re now training their people, as missionaries into all seven mountains.

See, one of the things where the church has failed, as we’ve said, well, there’s ministry, and then there’s secular life. That’s not a biblical worldview. Every Christian is called to full time ministry. It’s just what sphere. I’m called in the church sphere. You see, my job is to get you busy in your sphere for God. You see, church is to equip the saints for the work of ministry. Ministry isn’t something that happens at church. I mean, I know you know this, but ministry is whatever you’re called to do, as you do it for God. God has the ability through divine favor, to lift his people to places of influence if they’ll let it. And this is why it’s so important to actually believe you’re forgiven of your sins. Just a thought. But you see, how are you going to believe God’s going to do something radical in your life, if you don’t believe your sins are dealt with? You can’t be celebrating your inadequacy and your sinfulness and expect God to promote you. You have to be celebrating what Jesus has done for you. That ends the sin problem, so that God’s hand is upon you to raise you up in whatever sphere you’re called to. So that you can bring light into darkness and influence where without your influence, other things would happen.

So you work for a company, and they’re struggling. Well, what if you said, “You know, Lord, I have a covenant with you, and you want to provide for me. And so I guess you’ll have to bless my company. So I’m praying for my company to be blessed, because I’m there.” You know what that is, that’s a covenant mentality. You’re there as God’s covenant representative because you know him and you know, he loves you and you know he wants you to be blessed in life because Deuteronomy 28 says, Whatever you put your hand to will prosper. So God will exalt you. Prosper doesn’t just mean money, although it does include that. It means being a source of light and leadership wherever you’re called. So if there’s a problem on your job, you get before God and you say, “Lord, you said, Jesus is wisdom for me. So I’m asking you for wisdom to solve this problem.” And you become the problem solver in your company, because you hear from God, and He gives you not only wise answers to problems, but creative answers to to bring innovation wherever you are. What If the Church had this vision? What if we all thought, Well, I’m here to represent the kingdom of God with authority and with power, and to draw upon the wisdom of God and the creativity of God, and to expect His favor to be upon me? Well, that would make whatever you do an adventure. I mean, it’d be pretty exciting.

Well, part of the thing that, if you study the history of ideas and how we got to where we are, sometimes you have to discover how we got to where we are to undo it. But in the the early part of the 20th century, there was something that was called the social gospel. And it was kind of a liberal kind of Christianity that was involved in the social part of Jesus teaching, but really wasn’t teaching the new birth. And the result was it brought about a split. The evangelical part of the church that felt it was very important that the new birth was taught, divided from those who are working in the social sphere. And it became labeled the social gospel, and the social gospel became something that was suspicious to the evangelical church. Well, that dichotomy, that break was never intended by God. Because if you think about it, it was in feeding the the widows that Philip and Stephen discovered their supernatural ministry. And so the power of the gospel should never be divorced from the social part of the gospel. And we gave up. Just like we’ve given up big parts of our culture to the pagans, we gave up the social part of the gospel until the last probably 20 years, where the church really has started to rise up again and began to work in every area. But, also with a heart to see people saved, and to see the gospel implemented in their lives. You see, because those two things go together. We serve our culture, in order to have a voice to our culture. That’s how you get authority is by serving. And as you serve, favor comes and wisdom comes. And God opens doors, and gives you hearts and minds.

One of the great illustrations of this, do you know who John Maxwell is? Great leadership teacher. Well, Maxwell for 20 years was a Methodist pastor. And the Lord told him to began to teach leadership. And so he has done that for many years now. Well, a large corporation invited him to come in. And they had offices all around the world. And they called in all their leaders for an annual conference, and they had him come and speak. And I don’t remember if this was the same story, but the people said after his session, any questions, you know, he said, “Well, where do you get that stuff?” And he said, “Oh, you don’t want to know. And they hounded him, and he said, “Well, I got all of it from the Bible.” They said, “No.” Well, so the the CEO guy calls him into his office and he says, “Maxwell, you’re really good at what you do, and I want to have you continue to teach. But what do you want from me?” Well, here’s Maxwell’s big opportunity, if he was wrongly motivated, to make a deal. He says, “I don’t want anything from you.” He said, “Well, everybody wants something.” He said, “Okay, I want to be your friend.” Well he had him back the next year, and finally he says, “Maxwell, what is it about you? What is it about you?” He says, “Well, it’s Jesus Christ?” He said, “You’re kidding.” “No, it’s Jesus Christ.” Led the man to the Lord.

The next year, he didn’t get called back to speak, but he got a call from the CEO. He said, “I just wanted to tell you that I’m not having you come and speak this year, because I’ll be just giving my testimony.” Let’s see, he invaded that mountain as a servant, with wisdom from the kingdom. Cal Pierce wrote a book years ago called Book Burning, about the prejudice in publishing against Christian books, which is somewhat changed. But his comment was, “We don’t need to control things. We just need an opportunity to present our ideas, because our ideas are better than theirs. Because they’re kingdom.” You see? It isn’t like a war of manipulation, which goes on in so many realms. It’s actually, because Maxwell was a servant at heart and didn’t want anything, that it shocked this guy. And he realized there was something different about him. Well, I think that could happen in every realm if people had the vision.

Lance Wallnau, who may be know to some of you, told the story, well, he told two aspects of the story. One was he and a group of Christian business people raised a tremendous amount of money for the German evangelist Reinhard Bonnke, to do an open air crusade in Africa, and they did this crusade and something like a million people came to the Lord. It was very successful. But Wallnau said, but then they realized that all these converts were going back to their Muslim schools. Who would win their minds? The ones who had the crusade are the ones who controlled the mountain of education. And he began to realize that we needed to broaden our scope of vision, because revivals are not sustained because the culture dampens them after a few years. But if there was a vision for all realms of culture being invaded by the Christians, not only would revival be sustained, but it would become reformation. And that’s what we’re looking for. We’re not just looking for some kind of a revival, although I’m in favor of all the revival, we can have. But see, we’ve got to move beyond revival thinking, we’ve got to start thinking reformation, we’ve got to think we must invade the culture, or the culture will be totally invaded by things we don’t like.