Getting Ready for Revival

Are we not increasingly dismayed at what our children and grandchildren have never known in their experience of “Church”?:

-the sense of the sacred not just the singing of songs!

- a moving and working of God which is not manipulated or even forced by the antics and methods of whatever is doing the rounds of the “latest and newest” no matter how theologically inept and scripturally unsupportable, in it not being the “truest”!

- strong Biblical preaching that speaks of the eternal in addressing the soul, not just caressing the flesh with silly jokes, sentimental stories, contrived videos – and all in a neat 15 minute segment - which amuse and even move to tears, piquing our interests, without ever piercing our hearts and changing us for better and for ever, in the confrontation with Truth that cannot leave us the same, for better or for worse.

From FALL-OUT To BAIL-OUT Via Every “OUT” In Between!
The fall-out rate amongst Church-goers who have never been Christ-Ones is alarming, because of what the Church has largely sold-out to: short-term solutions which are so shallow and untested, which within a matter of a few years, are quickly grown-out of and left behind, because as we get older life becomes more complicated, and we discover that we need something more than the “religious-make-believe” so much of our modern worship songs are. Just as the world is dominated and driven by “entertainment” so the Church has become overrun and overruled by song-writers and worship-artists, setting the tone of how we now worship, having laid the tracks of what we now believe. Our doctrines and disciplines have been shelved and are now shaped by our musicians and the trends of their branded “music” and no longer preserved and passed on by our Bible Teachers and Church Traditions on the foundation of the timeless Word of God. This Church generation – shared by people of all ages – has to be one of the most arrogant in what we suppose we can ditch because of what we assume about ourselves that we, in this moment, have got it all together in a way that those before us just did not, and so we can jettison two thousand years of Church doctrine, practice and tradition, in favour of our own – even the “tradition” of having no traditions, the “practice” of having no form, and the “doctrine” of holding to none!

Much of modern-day Western Christianity is nothing more than “religious humanism” – centred around and promoting self, further evidenced by the ever-popular prosperity teachers who tell us that God is primarily concerned for our personal enhancement and advancement, in the ever-widening context of what is called “Emerging Church” where Truth is no longer absolute and thus the Bible no longer trustworthy as the Word of God! Is there not something amiss where the true mark of “spirituality” is deemed to be how ridiculous we can be for God and not how radical, with holiness dumbed-down and drowned-out by the clumsy clanging of hollowness? In the fullness of time what we in our “wisdom” have thrown-out will be the very same over which the apostates bail-out!