Revival Who Cares

It's a sad commentary on the modern church that she is quite content to carry on with the status quo. That means, friends, business as usual. The majority of the church membership is in apathy and indifference.

Apathy to the spiritual state of the church, and indifference to the lost and spread of the gospel. Very few Christians today give a flip about revival. They are unconcerned about revival because they've never taken the time to learn about it, or even look at their own situation.

Their idea of revival is limited to what they feel are evangelistic meetings at a church. I've been around a long time now, and I've watched in horror as one denomination after another has fallen into apostasy. I've seen churches once mightily used of God only to become houses of entertainment or cerebral lecture halls.

Either way, there is deadness and decay everywhere. And the chill and atmosphere is as bad as a morgue, and just as lifeless. Just dressed-up corpses with little emanation other than a knee-jerk here and there.

In the 1950s and even 1960s, we still had a majority of preachers in the land who were God-called men, who had a burden for the lost and a longing for revival. They still preached great doctrines of the gospel, like rune, redemption, repentance, and regeneration. They warned that sin was black and hell was hot, and a future judgment awaited all mankind.

They preached much about the blood. They sang many hymns about the blood, and their sermons were full of blood. There were windows that showed you a blood-stained Savior hanging on a bloody cross for sin.

But there was still a move of God in the land back then, and churches knew what revival was. You could still feel the power of God in a meeting, and folks were getting saved right and left. Churches were experiencing God and revival, and Christians knew what it was like to be in a red-hot love relationship with Jesus.

Then society began to fall apart at the seams with race riots, hippie love-ins, war protests, and the moral culture of a nation changed. But instead of the church staying on track, instead of the church hanging in there with the Bible and the Word of God as it was, it tried to accommodate society and become more effective in society, so it stopped preaching on hell. It taught a new gospel that said you could be saved apart from repentance and regeneration.

You made yourself a Christian. And looking back, friends, over the last 60 years, all I can do is weep over the state, the sad mess we are in. Your typical pastor doesn't know how to preach.

He's just a teacher, a middleman between his people and their Bible. Your typical church member is a baptized, unconverted individual who mistook church membership for salvation. Yes, there is a famine in the land today for hearing the Word of God, for there are few prophets among us.

I guess I can sum up the whole thing with this story. Years ago, I was standing in line for my Ph.D. degree at my seminary graduation day. And standing in line beside me was a pastor from Chattanooga.

And I asked him if he was praying for revival. I said, are you meeting, brother, with other pastors in your community on a regular basis to pray for revival? And he looked at me with a blank look, and his answer shocked me. He said, we don't need revival because we are on the grow.

As long as your church is growing, your church camp is expanding. Why? That's all that matters. Because success in ministry is no more than nickels and noses, brick and mortar.

That's all you need. Forget about the spiritual state of a soul. But in Mark's Gospel we read, And when he was coming to the house, his disciples asked him privately, why could not we cast him out? And he said unto them, This kind can come forth by nothing but by prayer and fasting.

The church today in the West is a powerless institution without any voice of authority, only a God-sent revival can alter things from where they are to where they need to be. There are three questions we must ask ourselves that determine our spiritual barometer. And these questions are, number one, Are we heartbroken over the state of the church? Are we heartburdened over the need for revival? Are we in heartache over the lost and perishing? How can we answer those three questions in sincerity of heart? If we can't really know what they mean, it will determine our own need for revival.

Society spins in moral chaos. Our nation sits on the brink of destruction. While we wait and try to figure it out.

Revival, who cares?