“O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness: fear before him, all the earth.”
Psalms 96:5
When I look back on the revivals that have happened throughout history, I see certain elements that have always been evident. I’ve put many of them in my book, “Four Steps to Revival”, but there are a couple that I don’t think I have emphasized enough – holiness and prayer.
Today’s messages are all about grace and love and mercy, not holiness. And who could argue against that? What wonderful things they are! How great and wonderful is our Salvations that rely upon the grace, love and mercy of God. We would be so lost without them? But is that all there is? Or are we using Grace to minimize the effect of sin, and thereby turning the grace of God into lasciviousness, like it says in Jude 1:4? Have we been so focused on receiving blessings that we have ignored the call to a crucified walk in the sufferings of the Body of Christ? Has this loving modern gospel offered us so much comfort that we have refused the Cross in our pursuit of the Crown?
Every revival in history has been preceded by a time of deep, broken-hearted repentance and remorse for our worldly sinful ways. Desperation, weeping and howling at the altar as it is described in Joel chapter 2, is what brings God’s attention to our cry for revival, not the singing and dancing of a superficial worship that bears no marks of the Cross. The Church is complacent in her mediocrity and feels no shame or remorse. She has a “whore’s forehead”. She refuses to be ashamed (Jeremiah 3:3), and therefore the harvest has been witholden and the revival has not come. Without holiness, no man shall see the Lord.
The other thing missing is prayer. Revivals are birthed in the labor room of deep, prevailing prayer. The men and women of God that brought forth great moves of God would contend and wrestle in brokenness before God for hours and hours. Four and five hours every day, crying out to God relentlessly was not uncommon. Four or five hours every day! I know of no one in 45 years of ministry that has prayed like that, and yet you will see it in the early labor pains of every revival. How is it that we can be so foolish and cavalier to think that we can just snap our fingers and bring forth a microwave revival – no price, no pain, no tears, no ripping and tearing of our souls. Just waggle our finger in the air with a Howdy Dowdy wooden grin and say “Praise Jesus”.
That kind of prayer brought forth men and women of great power and authority. Know anyone like that today? Me neither. The ones I knew are all dead. All we have left are some nice pastors with nice messages for nice people. There are no John the Baptists left to challenge us, no Elijah’s to call down fire, no Martin Luther’s, Billy Sundays, Wigglesworth’s, or any of those who walked with true God-given authority to call us to our knees in broken repentance and crushing prayer. And yet Jeremiah cried out that the effectiveness of a true prophet of God was seen in his ability to bring the people of God to a place of true repentance (Jeremiah 23:22), not in their ability to entertain us with message of peace and love.
But what difference will this article make? People will read this and bob their heads up and down like apples in a barrel of water, and then go on the same ways they have been accustomed to. Same ol’, same ol’. Like water, we always seek that level that we are comfortable with … until something terrible comes along to rattle us out of our apostasy.
Something terrible is coming that will shake to the roots our modern Christianity with its Pollyanna attitude of personal blessings, sweet Jesus and a love and mercy that excuses sin and dismisses the fear of the Lord. But we don’t believe that because we don’t want to. And so we will not listen. And as a result, we are destined to face it.
The Lord once told me as I was watching this modern Christianity run in their hypnotic trance straight for the edge of a cliff, that even if they could hear me – which they could not – they will not listen. They are too set in a doctrine that they want to believe and like the children of Israel at the foot of Mt. Sinai, they are given over to the golden calves that they have created for themselves.
“And all the people brake off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them unto Aaron. And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.” Exodus 32:3-4