This post is the second of a three-part series. The first post is here.
Lukewarm religion, a.k.a. “cultural Christianity,” is the cancer of the modern church. This acceptable normalcy for too many churches and Christians continues unabated as more people get caught in its clinches and pastors treat it as normal. There are advantages, after all, with its ease of acceptance, lack of demands, and conformability to life. It goes wherever you want to go, does whatever you want to do, and sounds like whatever you want it to sound like, as long as you qualify it with the adjective “Christian.” Cultural Christianity is the damnable qualifier of church sub-culture.
Cultural Christianity always breeds distance from God. Knowledge about God drives one to do more for God but provides no greater intimacy with God or feeling of acceptance from God. People who live in this lukewarm religion are always spiritually exhausted. It is offensive to God (Rev. 3:16) and undesirable for people. Affluence, all too often, accompanies it and is used to quell any felt sense of desperation. It simultaneously cools spiritual fervor, rationalizes passiveness toward action, and deceives about one’s true spiritual state of being (Rev. 3:17). Wait. You need to stop and read Rev 3:17. When the comforts of life, casualness of relationship with God, chaos of the world, or convenience of “Christianity” causes you to cool in fervor and passion for God, you are in spiritual desperation. You need spiritual defibrillation. We live in desperate times, and desperate times call for desperate measures.
I recently began a new sermon series entitled “Prayer for Revival” as a means to lead LifePoint to pray for a mighty move of God. God is working in powerful ways in many individual lives at LifePoint. I’m praying for revival fire to spread from individual stories to become our congregational narrative. I want the redeeming power of God to move so distinctively through our congregation that many more people experience the life-giving, sin-crushing, freedom finding, soul-satisfying power of Almighty God.
Psalm 85 has shaped our prayer for revival. Here are four motivations that I pray will move you to pray and seek God to blow revival fire.
The first motivation to pray for revival is that God has done it before. Revival is God’s specialty. When you see God’s past actions, you know his ability and will to act. He may not work in identical ways to what he has done, but the kind of work he will do is always consistent with his redemptive power. God doesn’t just repeat the past. That would get boring. God works in ways distinctive to what he can do, according to his will, with new mercy and redeeming power.
A second motivation to pray for revival is that God wants to move. God wants to move, and more and more for glory and the good of his people. The more we know of God’s character, the more we understand his will and the way he works.
The confidence in Psalm 85 is in God, that he will act with revival power. This is no “quick fix, rub the bottle, and wish to the genie to fix my situation or solve my problem.” Revival prayer is “take my life and let it be, wholly consecrated unto thee.” Until you get to the end of self, you are not at a point where you are ready to lay your life before God. As long as you are content to trust self you will not turn to God for an out-pouring of life like you’ve never known before.
Revival prayer agrees with God about who he is, what he has done, and how he works. We have nothing to offer to God. We simply confess “God, we know you can because you have. We know you want to because you have said. Turn us to you to do what only you can do, revive us.” God responds to prayer for revival.
A third motivation to pray for revival is the journey of seeking God always grows God’s people and gives hope to the world. You cannot seek after God and not experience great spiritual growth in your life. It may not look like you had envisioned. But God always honors prayer for revival.
The point of revival is not arrival, but a journey where our lives become more distinct unto God in holiness and godliness. “Dwell,” in verse 9, is the root word for the term Shekinah, which in later Judaism became an expression for God’s glory dwelling among his people and a name for God himself. The journey of seeking God is one where God inhabits an increasing portion of our life. In revival, God’s glory consumes more of us. God’s plan is to fill his people with the Light of Life, so they can burn brightly as the light of the world. When God’s glory burns in you, his hope goes forth into the world.
A fourth motivation to pray for revival is that God’s power is unimaginably greater in provision, more powerful in witness, and more prosperous in blessing for the city. The trajectory of Psalm 85 begins very low and climaxes through the end. Remembering what God had done was enough to give full confidence of what he would do.
I am hungry for God to move in more powerful ways than we have experienced. I want to see God work in more powerful ways in families, homes and marriages, students, to break the bondage of sinful enslavement, and to break the comfort of our culture’s stranglehold of casual Christianity.
What do you hunger after?
In my final post I will share five principles for revival. If you read this, I hope your heart will be stirred to pray for revival, personally, as well as for your church congregation.