KEYS TO REVIVAL

KEY #2 - REPENTANCE AND THE DOCTRINES OF GRACE

There are two things to which every Christian must agree. These are the Total Depravity of Man and the Perseverance of the Saints. A truly rejuvenated, born of the Spirit and saved individual immediately knows the depravity from which she or he was rescued.  This is the point where we literally came to a knowledge of the sinful condition of our hearts, bodies, minds and soul and either choose to continue - or surrender our entire being to the One Who Created and saved us, by His Grace. 

In his psalm of Repentance, King David "Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, And in sin my mother conceived me. Behold, You desire truth in the innermost being..." (psalm 51:5-6a). The great man of God, who broke God's commandment of not just adultery, but of coveting, lying, murder, idolatry etc...was describing the depraved and corrupt state of the human condition, brought forth by original sin. We do not have to go into detail about the perversion of modern man. It was already written of in Genesis 6 when God wiped out mankind and started over with Noah. The modern state of corrupt humanity is to be acknowledged, pitied and then prayed about.

When we have come to the knowledge of our transgression against God by breaking all of His laws and statutes, as David did when he killed one of his best friends to steal his wife, we are on the road to restoration. Or maybe not! Many choose to follow that road to their destruction - again as we see in the modern American and European society where God is mocked. Unfortunately, most will choose the road to perdition. But not so, those who seek a city, where the builder and architect is God.

These are undisputed facts. Mankind has been totally depraved since the Fall in the Garden and anyone who questions that just has to look at American culture, TV and society. This alone should lead us to repentance. Even if Repentance as the key cornerstone of Sanctification is not taught in your church or mine. Those who walk by the Spirit instinctively know when things are not well with the soul. Repentance is not a change of mind, contrary to what prosperity gospel preachers like Joseph Prince say. If repentance was a change of mind, you can easily change your mind back to sinning ways, unless your mind has been stayed upon Jehovah.

Repentance is a COMPLETE CHANGE OF DIRECTION. Psalm 51 is the Biblical model of Repentance (click here). When we have gotten so far away from the commands and statutes of God that we are "outside the camp", that we are faced with two options - either keep going over the cliff, or turn around. This is where we are at in terms of seeking Revival. This type of Revival is personal. Before a Spiritual Awakening could take hold and catch fire as it did with George Whitefield, or Duncan Campbell or The Jesus Movement, it must begin with you and me. It must bring us to our knees as we grasp the awesomeness and sheer power and scope of first the Majesty of God and then His Wrath.

It is vogue in the West to ignore the part of the Bible which talk about the Wrath and Judgment of God. People ignore this attribute of God at their own personal peril.  We must be on our faces, even, crying out for mercy like the hundreds in Enfield, Connecticut in July 1741 when the great Jonathan Edwards preached the most famous sermon ever in America - Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God! People were literally on the floor in tears with their fears, as Edwards read monotone from the amazing prepared text he brought! What was it that brought such conviction and the need to repent and make things right with God? It was the Word of God and the very fact that Jonathan Edwards pierced their hard hearts. All he had to do was remind that it is only the Grace of God which kept them from being sent to hell, this very minute. They believed him to their eternal credit. Today, no one believes us. But we never give up. We lived repentant daily lifestyles of light, liberty and leaning on the very same Word of God which drove us to our knees and then gave us the victory.

Many are praying for America to be in a Third Great Awakening or for some sort of region, city or state where "Lord bring Your fire" sort of Revival.  This will never happen unless the saints of God are fully repentant, in one accord before the Throne seeking personal and THEN corporate forgiveness as a church. It is only at such a time, when this has been accomplished that we can corporately pray for the Lord to move on a nation, with expectation. Anything else is praying into a horizontal cross-breeze, not up to the Throne.

With these matters settled before the Lord, it is only then we can even begin to speak about the bookends to the Total Depravity of man - and that is - Perseverance of the Saints. This is too important to just briefly describe in a blog posting. What is most critical to know about Perseverance as a child and follower of God through Christ is that only Jesus can give us the ability to persevere. A life of daily repentance or walking in the Spirit and the Light of Christ make persevering through these evil days all the more bearable and even edifying towards maturity, if we see things through His Eyes. We can only have those Eyes if we, who are called by His Name, understand from whence we came, the Price paid for us and what is expected of us. Anything less than earnest repentance will not bring us where we need to be, if we are seeking personal and corporate Revival.

(Photo courtesy National Day of Prayer Australia)

KEYS TO REVIVAL

KEY #1 - COUNT IT ALL JOY

As one whose faith in the Lord Jesus Christ was permanent affected by a revival

at age 11, it has been a life long quest to see same everywhere.  I can't remember when well-meaning church leaders have NOT prayed for revival. These are all tremendous and worthwhile goals and no one I know is against any of it. However for revival to occur, it must start with us as individuals. Unless a person has found his/her peace, joy contentment and has been rejuvenated by THE SPIRIT of the Lord, all talk of revival is elementary. 

There is a reason that revival, like Jesus tarries. The reason is that we, as a body are not ready and we are not ready because we are not repentant. We are not even engaged, apart from a bold few nationally and locally, in stand up for the Truth, the Gospel and the Way of the Lord. So why then should the Father in Heaven allow another great awakening on His Spirit in a land where even Christians act like they would rather have the world, than Jesus?

I am reading a book called "The Printer and the Preacher" by Randy Peterson and its well-researched details are stunning! The printer is Benjamin Franklin, the most memorable of all the Founding Fathers of the United States and the preacher is the man- George Whitefield - who brought the Gospel to America that gave her its now troubled soul. 

There could not have been two more different men in this world - one (Whitefield) an outcast from the state church who led the First Great Awakening/Revival in the US and was faithful to his wife and our Lord and the other (Franklin) - a genius in everything he touched, but who loved the flesh more than the Father. Yet, both cooperated in true friendship to bring a new life to a new land.

What made it work back in the mid 1700's was decency and civility towards a common goal, even from the non-Christian Franklin. What is happening to day harkens back to the earliest day in the church when Peter and John were on the run from those current rulers of iniquity - Romans and religious. Sure, these are the times which trouble men's souls, but these are also the times where many are falling away to their own future loss before a great white throne. Jesus' half brother James showed us the way to not just persevere through these days of return to the persecuted church, but to emerge victorious. The fact remains, revival or not, we are victorious at the end of the day - not the dark side, whose victory will not stand in the Day of the Lord.

James 1:2-4 says "Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials,  knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing".

So the first step to revival, after being justified fully and walking in righteous faith - regardless of the evil foul winds of culture - is we must "CONSIDER/COUNT/ESTEEM....or reckon it, be of the opinion..." that these kinds of days we see in the world around us today, were going to happen and we have to make it through these storms. This is not easy to do. In the Middle East and Asia we see God's people brutalized beyond description. We cannot imagine why this is happening. Yet, we are to "count it all joy". In the US, we see lives, businesses and people literally destroyed for being authentic followers of Jesus while powerful leaders only talk and claim to be of Christ, because it is the decent label to have in the west - Christian.  Still we count it all joy!

In small towns and cities and various other places, the remnant of the Lord Jesus Christ still proclaims the Love, Truth and Power of the Gospel. We count it all joy by being proactive and walking in His Light while people love the darkness more. We count it all joy to share the Hope that is within us with as many as possible because their time is short as well, and most are not ready. Revival is coming - but only to those whose hearts are open to true hope, change and transformation. This is our charge to keep, as we press forward into a new season of evangelism, proclamation and sharing the Love of the Savior. We are ready.

(Image courtesy: Christian Clip Art) 

FOUNDATIONS OF AMERICAN ATHEISM, PART 1

CHAUNCY, UNITARIAN/LIBERAL

PART 1 - CHARLES CHAUNCY

Have you ever wondered why teens from youth groups and solid Christian homes, lose their faith in college?

Have you ever wondered why even famous American institutions of higher learning, like Harvard and Princeton, went from being colleges founded as 100% Christian, slid quickly into the hotbeds of Universalism at best, and  paganism at worst, in the past century or so?

Have you even wondered why an entire society, beginning in the liberal New England region, pushed secularist thought and humanist reason so much that it now permeates every level of society .....which also now threatens to destroy the principles of Religious Freedom, upon which the United States was founded?

How did this all happen?  Well, the seeds of this can be traced to two decades, before and after the American Revolution of the 1770's! In this short series, we will look briefly at the men who never really believed in the founding Biblical principles of a new nation....while still fighting the good fight for it! We will take a good look at men from Charles Chauncy to Thomas Paine and Jefferson himself! Regardless of what the well-intentioned modern Christian historian David Barton says, he cannot revise the History of these men, in order to make them look like followers of the Jesus Christ every one of them rejected. What these men did in part, was set in motion the secular United States we see today, which France has lived under since the French Revolution.

Charles Chauncy (1705-1787) was a Congregational minister in Boston, who was the great grandson of the second president of Harvard College (now Harvard University). When the winds of True Revival swept through the comatose body of New England Christianity, Chauncy was one of its first and most vocal enemies! Here was a supposed minister of the Gospel, literally resisting the Spirit and fires of the Lord! He hated the reaction of the masses of people, by the thousands, who responded to the Call to Repent and realize the fleeting nature of Life, their miserable estate before God and the need for Salvation. In churches and wide open fields they came, sometimes up to 30,000 at a time, to hear the most fiery and powerful preacher of the Gospel for 200 years until Billy Graham came along.

George Whitefield was that man! Chauncy hated him. He hated him personally. He hated the preaching which came out of the true Reformation - about the Total Depravity of man and the need for forgiveness and crying out to God to be saved. Thousands reacted to this powerful preaching with tears and heart-felt emotion. This was something which those in the elite of the clergy, and the upper crust of society, frown vehemently upon. Never mind that their churches were the beneficiaries of all these people getting saved and coming to Christ!  In fact, Chauncy and his elitist clergy friends, which included the boards of Harvard and Yale, banned Whitefield from even being allowed on the premises of their colleges! To make it worse, Chauncy then proceed to preach against not just Whitefield, but the First Great Awakening Move of God! But wait, there was more - he followed Whitefield all over Massachusetts as he preached open air to scores of thousands, and then published pamphlet sermons against Whitefield and his messages!

One day, when both men happened to meet accidentally on a Boston street, Chauncy was overheard saying to Whitefield "I am sorry to see you return!" To which Whitefield said "so is the devil!1" But personal animosity aside, what this Chauncy did was not just conduct his personal war against True Revival, led by the Holy Spirit, as the leader of a prominent congregation and a Harvard official, he used it to lead millions now, away from the Full Counsel of God, as found in the Scriptures.

Chauncy called himself a Calvinist like the great Jonathan Edwards or Whitefield or the rest of the Revival preachers, but he was not one.  His doubt of the Word was the impetus for him first believing and then sowing the seeds of "common sense" or Reason as the unbelieving French called it. He ceased to believing in the Triune God or the Trinity - Father, Son and Holy Spirit! He stopped believing in Original Sin (whereas Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden) and thus, he did not believe in a literal hell! Two years before he died, Chauncy published a book he could never have gotten away with years before during the American Revolution. It was called "The Mystery Hid from Ages and Generations". 

This man is solely responsible for the spread of liberal Protestantism and even worse than that, he gave us what came to be known as the Unitarian Universalist. Chauncy pastored there for 60 years and had the opportunity to corrupt many a mind, in what is now known as the hotbed of all kinds of liberalism - the North East USA! The Unitarian movement he spawned has had awful consequences for the Furtherance of the True Gospel of Christ in that region. True Christianity is not welcome in these Ivy League colleges anymore. Charles Chauncy was but one of the founding pillars of American Atheism, and a man who showed the spiritual path out away from Jesus Christ for many we see today.

COMING UP:

PART 2: THOMAS PAINE, JEFFERSON AND THE FRENCH INFLUENCE

PART 3: ETHAN ALLEN AND ELIHU PALMER

1. Seasons of Refreshing by Keith J, Hardman (Baker Books 1994 pg 74)