Godhead

Hearing God

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Now there was a disciple at Damascus named Ananias. The Lord said to him in a vision, "Ananias." And he said, "Here I am, Lord." And the Lord said to him, "Rise and go to the street called Straight, and at the house of Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul, for behold, he is praying, and he has seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight." But Ananias answered, "Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints at Jerusalem. And here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who call on your name." But the Lord said to him, "Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel. For I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name." So Ananias departed and entered the house. And laying his hands on him he said, "Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus who appeared to you on the road by which you came has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit."
—Acts 9:10-17 ESV

While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, "Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them." Then after fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off. So, being sent out by the Holy Spirit, they went down to Seleucia, and from there they sailed to Cyprus.
—Acts 13:2-4 ESV

And they went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia. And when they had come up to Mysia, they attempted to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them. So, passing by Mysia, they went down to Troas.
—Acts 16:6-8 ESV

Now the LORD said to Abram, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." So Abram went, as the LORD had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran.
—Genesis 12:1-4 ESV)

And [Abraham's servant] said, "O LORD, God of my master Abraham, please grant me success today and show steadfast love to my master Abraham. Behold, I am standing by the spring of water, and the daughters of the men of the city are coming out to draw water. Let the young woman to whom I shall say, 'Please let down your jar that I may drink,' and who shall say, 'Drink, and I will water your camels'—let her be the one whom you have appointed for your servant Isaac. By this I shall know that you have shown steadfast love to my master." Before he had finished speaking, behold, Rebekah, who was born to Bethuel the son of Milcah, the wife of Nahor, Abraham's brother, came out with her water jar on her shoulder. The young woman was very attractive in appearance, a maiden whom no man had known. She went down to the spring and filled her jar and came up. Then the servant ran to meet her and said, "Please give me a little water to drink from your jar." She said, "Drink, my lord." And she quickly let down her jar upon her hand and gave him a drink. When she had finished giving him a drink, she said, "I will draw water for your camels also, until they have finished drinking."
—Genesis 24:12-19 ESV

One of the interesting byproducts of reading through the McCheyne Bible reading program is that it daily shows four timelines of redemptive history. The past couple weeks covered Genesis, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Matthew, and Acts, and the one thing that is inescapable from these readings is how God moved people around to accomplish His will. YieldHe speaks to Abram and the patriarch moves out of what he knows into a foreign land. Ezra and Nehemiah are commissioned by Persian kings to journey back home to rebuild the temple and Jerusalem. God uproots Esther from her home and places her in the king's palace, proving how she was born to petition on behalf of her people in that time and place. Jesus is driven by the Holy Spirit out into the wilderness. Ananias is even given the right address for finding the man that God says he must meet. And Paul and Barnabas are selected by the Spirit and sent on the exact mission He directs.

I think it's been almost twenty years since Gary Friesen's Decision Making and the Will of God first came out. Almost every person I knew was reading the book back then, so I had to also just to see what the buzz was about. The feeling I got upon finishing the book was that it seemed to have a disparaging view of God's special and particular guidance of individuals.

Having put twenty more years on my faith in Christ, I can't escape the reality I've seen with my own two eyes in that time and the empty feeling I had in my heart upon finishing Friesen's book. To believe that God does not guide individuals at times by His voice today is to ignore the means by which our immutable God has spoken to people throughout redemptive history. Friesen's Way of Wisdom (as he calls it) seems to apply only to the moral guidance of God (the "do this, don't do that" admonitions we find in Scripture) or to application of general Biblical principles to specific situations.

I have no quibbles with Friesen's contention that God may have no specific opinion about a fork in the road before us. If that's the case, then relying on the wisdom of others or one's accumulated Scripturally-accurate wisdom is a legitimate means of following God's will.

But it's Friesen's argument against specific guidance that bothers me.

I included several interesting passages out of the McCheyne listings that kept hitting me over the head concerning the issue of God's unique guidance to unique people at a unique time, something that Friesen maintains is somewhat extraordinary for the common man.

Yet in Acts we see a common man, Ananias, not revealed here as prophet or an apostle, but as a "generic" disciple of the Lord. It's hard to escape the stunning specificity of the message the Lord speaks to him. Names, places, acts to be performed—even what the "target" is doing at the time. God lays it all out.

Too unusual? Not for today?

When Paul and Barnabas are commissioned, they are called out specifically by the Holy Spirit for the general work of making disciples in a specific place. While some may argue the place was not specifically given, I would contend that the fact that the two hopped a ship for Cyprus is quite another thing than to go to the nearest town and make disciples. The two apostles were acting under specific guidance in light of a general command.

That specificity is raised again in Acts 16 when Paul and Timothy avoid Asia for other parts, having been specifically told by the Holy Spirit not to go there. Matthew Henry's commentary is interesting here:

It was the Holy Ghost that forbade them, either by secret whispers in the minds of both of them, which, when they came to compare notes, they found to be the same, and to come from the same Spirit; or by some prophets who spoke to them from the Spirit.

Either way, that's specific guidance for a specific reason known only to God. Whether Greater Asia was not ready or that God had a more pressing need for them to go elsewhere is hard to say. All we know was that He revealed that Asia was off-limits. I personally like the contrast here when we dig deeper for the second blockade appears to be more one of circumstance. They tried to go but were prevented. The first blockade appears to be known beforehand, not being one of circumstance, but of objective revelation.

From there we go from the beginning of the Church to the beginnings of the Israelites. God speaks to Abraham specifically, but His revelation is general in that He does not tell Abraham where he should go, only that he must. In this way, the leading of Paul and the leading of Abraham affirm God desire to guide people in a certain way. From the beginning of the Book to the very end (John's specific revelation), God guides individuals in a specific way at a specific time through specific revelation to accomplish His specific will.

I'll end this analysis of Scriptures from McCheyne's list by noting the specific way in which Abraham's servant prayed for specific wisdom so that he could bring back the right wife for Isaac. His appeal is to God's promise to Abraham, interestingly enough, because Isaac needed a wife to fulfill God's covenant with his master.

In Genesis and Acts we see dozens of instances of God imparting specific guidance to specific individuals for a specific purpose that accomplishes God's specific will. Why should we expect any less of our unchanging God today?

What follows is just one story, and not the most earth-shaking of the things I've seen, but the simplicity of it makes the point.

Not long ago, I was sitting in one of our armchairs reading the newspaper, my son having gone down for an unexpected nap. I was partly through a gripping article when God told me to get up and go outside. I felt silly because I had no idea what I was supposed to do when I got outside. Standing there in my driveway, trying to find some purpose in being there, I decided to check our mailbox at the end of the long, hidden driveway that leads up to our house. I crossed over the road to the mailbox in time to see a car coming up the little hill that crests at the mailbox.

The car never made it to the top; it conked out thirty feet from where I was standing. I walked down to see what was going on. An obviously less well-off woman with two young children was trying to start her beaten-up truck—no luck. A quick check revealed she was out of gas.

Now I have no real need for gas here. Most of my farm equipment is diesel. I keep a single 2.5 gallon gas can for the lawnmower and weedwhacker, but I use them so infrequently that the whole container lasts a year and half. Just a few days before, I had drained that tank. Without any need to have it filled right away, I nevertheless had topped it off the day before all this. My house and driveway are impossible to see from where her truck died. None of the three neighbors near me were home.

Living off an unmarked county road, the speed limit is 55. I cautiously filled the tank since I was right on the yellow line and people can't see over the hill. No cars had come by the entire time this was going on—not unusual. Still the situation wasn't great because any car coming up behind her truck would be stupid to pass and would have to sit. We didn't have a whole lot of time to chat.

But I did have the opportunity to tell her this story, telling her that I was a Christian and had heard God ask me to help her even before her truck died. I made sure she knew that God loved her very much to look out for her and her children that way. Just as I was about to get even deeper, those cars that had held off for the entire time all showed up at once. I had to let her go on her way. She was very thankful.

I don't know Gary Friesen. I wonder, though, if he has a way to explain that encounter. I wonder if he were sitting in that armchair reading the newspaper if he would have gone outside on account of God telling him to.

Are we limiting God? Even more, are we missing out on wondrous blessings if we don't believe that God works this way in guiding people? Some would argue that the encounter was guidance I wasn't actively seeking, but I'm not sure if Ananias or Abraham were expecting God's knocking on their heart's door, either. Sometimes we seek God and sometimes He comes to us.

Anyone who puts God in a box is going to live a small life. He gives us as much as we are willing to believe.

I don't know about you, but a small life doesn't interest me in the slightest.

Update: For more on this issue as it applies to prayer, please see "Hearing God: The Prayer Example."

Tags: Guidance, God's Will, , Church, Faith, Christianity, Jesus, God

21 Steps to a 21st Century Church – Part 5 (Conclusion)

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No need to wait for March Madness, the Final Four are here today!

So without further cleverness, here are the final four issues that the Church in the West needs to address if she’s to be the light to the world that the Lord intends her to be.

4. Make the church for believers
Anyone who’s been watching the Church in the West, and America in particular, has seen the spectacular, meteoric flame-out of the Church Growth Movement. All sound and fury signifying nothing, the CGM gave us their new and improved Church without a Cross™. The upshot is that we now have a Church whose teaching consists of nothing more than milk 24/7/365, and mostly byproducts at that. It’s like casein —and anyone who’s ever eaten a $2 pizza knows how gross that tastes!

For 13 years I was part of a what was once a fantastic church that progressively fell on hard discipleship times because it swallowed the CGM whole. In our final grim days there, it got so bad that I alerted the church’s denomination that the church had gone so far to attract anyone they could that they’d actually stopped preaching the Gospel. Messages had become mired in Human Potential Movement garbage and a smarmy cuteness aimed at those who live for cultural relevance. After repeated unsuccessful attempts to get to the pastor to ask him what was up, my wife and I finally left.Only later did it come out that we weren’t the only ones. More than 40% of mature Christians within that church were bailing out year over year. Eventually the leadership of the church recognized the hemorrhage and repented, but we were long gone—and with a bitter taste in our mouths.The lesson here is one that all Christians should heed: the Church of Jesus Christ is for those who believe in Him. It is NOT for unbelievers. We are sent OUT to the world to bring the Gospel out to the perishing. Once the lost believe, we are to bring them IN to our churches. In their attempts to reach the unsaved, what our churches must never do is dumb-down the messages and training toward maturity that growing Christians need so that unbelievers can be accommodated. And especially if that accommodation looks no different from the world.

The Church consists of the called-apart people. Our teachings should be geared toward Christian maturity, not toward those who don’t even know Christ. The abject failure of the Church Growth Movement is that it didn’t spike the numbers in the truly converted. Sure, it attracted a few people who traditionally had skipped church, but that came at the expense of people looking for substance. Meanwhile, mature Christians have abandoned the typical church on the corner, delving into house churches, emerging churches, or skipping church altogether. They’re so fed up they don’t know what to do.

What to do is this: our churches should always hold Christ’s banner high so that those who can embrace it will, not low so that it gets trample upon. The Church has to be for believers first. Strengthening real believers into hardcore disciples is our mission. We send them out into the world equipped and ready; they bring in the harvest. No other method works.

3. Recover prayer & fasting—especially to repentance
Truthfully, I’m not sure I should add anything here. I’ve said before that we can’t expect miracles to happen, we can’t take down the Enemy, we can’t do anything at all in the Lord’s power unless we’re serious about prayer.But we’re not praying. We’re “practicing the presence” or we’re tossing up tiny “prayerlets,” but our frenzied lives have left us devoid of real down-on-our-knees prayer—though we’ve never needed that kind of prayer more than now.One of my all-time favorite Christian authors and speakers was Leonard Ravenhill. He said this about prayer: “No man is greater than his prayer life.” I don’t think a greater truth ever existed in eight simple words.Fasting. What can I say? Are we doing it? I knew a lot of guys growing up who fasted in order to find a wife. Sounds hokey, but a host of guys are nodding their heads as they read this. However, now that we have wives, we’ve let this one slip. The Bridegroom’s gone away, but if we want Him to come back to find faith on this third rock from the sun, we better be fasting along with our praying. Fasting goes with prayer like peanut butter goes with jelly (well, maybe that’s not such a great illustration—pairing food imagery with fasting—but hey, it’s late!) Both are great individually, but together they’re more than the sum of their parts.

And to what end should the Church be fasting and praying today? To repentance.

Does anyone besides me think that if every church in this country called the faithful to prayer and fasting toward repentance that God wouldn’t shake things up? People have called me idealistic before, but I still believe that if the Church in the West got down on its knees, fasting and praying until the gates of heaven shook, God would do a mighty work among us.

I believe that dire days are ahead for the Church in the West unless we repent. God has already removed some of His Glory from us and given it to the Third World because they have come to Him in their poverty, believed Him, and gone out to minister as if every day is the last. And what did the West do? The children of the world said, “Jump!” and we replied, “How high?”

I don’t ordinarily pick fights with people, but I will on this topic if people say, “No way.” We’ve lost something here in Western Christianity and if we don’t want to see our lampstand removed altogether, we better get serious about prayer and fasting, especially to repentance.

2. Live by The Golden Rule
I may have reiterated this particular case here one too many times in these twenty-one steps, but I promise this is the last time. Stay with me.Jesus wasn’t scourged for 401k accounts. He didn’t have a crown of thorns driven into His scalp so we could fight to get the latest iPod. He didn’t have three nails pounded through His hands and feet so that we could climb over the little people on our way to the brass ring. He didn’t die in agony on a hillside for the world to see so that we could pass by the homeless man on the street and feel good about our lot. Jesus Christ died for people—and not just you and me.I believe our hopelessly broken societal “norms” have led us to this grim place where our first inclination when we meet someone for the first time is to assign them a stereotype we believe they fit. We judge. We assess. We categorize. We assume.Jesus Christ annihilates that thinking. He says:

And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.
—Luke 6:31 ESV

I can’t help but think that if we truly believed this verse and lived it out, it would transform every single aspect of how we relate to people. We think the Golden Rule is good enough for our children, but when did it stop being good enough for us?

What would happen in the Church in the West in 2006 if every one of us who call Jesus Lord would view every relational encounter we have in a day through the lens of Luke 6:31?

I’ve got to believe that the world would be a far different place.

1. Show people Jesus
Earlier, I mentioned how a church I’d been a part of self-destructed by going completely seeker-sensitive.During a service at that church back a handful of years ago, the Lord revealed a great truth to me. I saw all those people in that huge church glued to some well-calculated, but throwaway, piece of church programming, yet the cry of their hearts was for what they were not getting. That cry was, Show us Jesus.Folks, are we showing people Jesus or are we giving them something (or even someone) else? The heartcry of every person on this planet no matter what it may seem to be on the surface is show us Jesus.Now I’m not so ignorant that I don’t realize there are people who are sworn enemies of Christ, but I still believe that even they want to see Jesus, if for no other reason than to steel their own resolve against Him, to hate His people more, to gnash their teeth at their own Christ-denying error.

But this is not about them. It’s about those people who are desperate to know Jesus, but have no idea where to turn to find Him.

What saddens me more than anything else is to see people crying out to see Jesus, yet we give them man-made garbage instead. For those of us who know Christ, why has it become so hard for us to show Him to others?

The problem starts in the household of Faith. If we’re to show people Jesus, then we have to know Him first. We must know His words, know His voice, and have spent so much time at His feet that we know Him better than we know ourselves. Only that kind of dedicated servant of Christ can show Him to other people.

That’s where the weakness is, though. We truly don’t know Him all that well. We know about Him to some extent, but we’re not spending enough time on our faces before Him to know Him as a person. So the world goes waiting while we get to know the cast of our favorite TV show, or the latest stock market trend, or whatever noise the world serves up to us to keep us from knowing the one person who can save the world.

Jesus. It always comes down to Him because He is all that matters.

***

I believe that if we took these 21 steps, the Church of Jesus Christ would be radically altered. If we only took these last four steps, nothing would be the same.

I can’t live like the middling throngs. Breathing light into the darknessThe Christianity we live in the West doesn’t have to be toothless. Christ didn’t do all He did so we can be feeble in our living of the Gospel. The Church we see in Acts rocked the world! Strongholds were demolished, people were wrenched out of the hand of the Enemy, the dead were raised—and not just the spiritually dead!

Are we happy with the Church we see today? I’m not. My problem is that I’m the Church. If I expect to see change, then it starts inside me. Christ alone has the words of eternal life. Only in Him is true purpose found, true life.

Leonard Ravenhill, again, put it all in perspective when he said, “When are we going to get serious about getting serious?”

For 2006, let’s answer that question with the only answer that matters: Today.

***

Fire in China, Ashes in America

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God's torch is passing to Asia, and he is performing many miracles in China.
—American missionary David Lin

Diane over a Crossroads is starting a series looking at the underground Chinese Church. I'll be quoting liberally from her blog, Chinese Girl with Her Biblebut as always, it pays great dividends to read her post.

Every Godblogger I know tries to tell it like it is, but inevitably the vast majority of us are English-speakers of American and British extraction. No matter what we might think of ourselves, most of us are not that much different in how we reflect a Western Church philosophy with roots in Reformation Europe. Acculturated as we are within Evangelicalism (mostly), we also take on the sheen of our wealthy American and U.K. culture. Especially for those of us in the United States, our models for how to live out the Christian walk are inextricably linked to American Manifest Destiny, the American Dream, Rugged Individualism, and a "What's in it for me?" attitude.

Yet not every Christian in the world thinks or acts like we do. I know it's hard to believe, but we are not the measure of all things Christian.

Yesterday, I posted that our Western roots and over-reliance on Greek thought have led us into a pit of division, where sides must be chosen, for some have even wondered which hemisphere of our brains is more godly. While we seem to be obsessed with drawing dividing lines wherever we can stick our straight-edge, the non-Western world shows us a Christianity far less at odds with itself—or with the Gospel.

Take the simple act of prayer. Ask most Americans about prayer and they'll say they wholeheartedly believe in it, even if they don't do all that much of it daily. The Chinese underground Church takes a different stance. Not only are the leaders of those churches praying several hours each day, but they have older saints who are devoting themselves to prayer all day and most of the night.

A couple years ago I posted a comment to TheOoze Web site stating that I did not believe that the Church in America would ever see any kind of revival unless people started praying a minimum of two hours a day. The response was that two hours of daily time dedicated to nothing but prayer was too much to ask. TheOoze is an Emerging Church site, so I was not surprised by that reaction from the mostly sub-35 crowd there. But what has been eye-opening to me is that Emerging Church foes in the Traditional Church largely have the same response: two hours solely devoted to prayer is unreasonable given most people's circumstances.

If one assumes that we continue to follow the societal structures we've created in our "every man for himself" society hellbent on fifty hour work weeks, two hour commutes, and family quality time, then maybe two hours is too much to ask. But persecuted Chinese Christians are pulling it off. They seem to be loaded with praying people, but where are our Western prayer warriors? If we wonder why Christianity in the U.S. is in the doldrums, I think we should look no further than the woeful prayer lives that most of us have, from the newest believer up to the most senior pastor. What kind of vital faith do we expect to see when we try to squeeze by on a handful of minutes tossed heaven's way while we rush around like headless chickens?

I don't hear American Christians talk about breakthroughs in the Spirit the way the Chinese do, either. We tend to timidly toss in the towel when confronted with a mountain-sized challenge—or else we resort to the following:

  • Traditional Church – Form a committee to examine the challenge. Form another one when the original disbands because of in-fighting.
  • Emerging Church – Walk a labyrinth to clear our heads so we can think deep, spiritual thoughts about the challenge while asking, "What would Thomas Merton do?"
  • Seeker-Sensitive Church – Commission a demographic study to examine what most people think of the challenge, then design new programming that makes talking about the challenge culturally relevant.
  • Charismatic Church – Bring in a band of traveling prophets to have them scry the meaning of the challenge in terms of battle plans for Joel's Last Days Army.

What do Chinese house churches do? They fast and pray for as long as it takes for God to resolve the challenge. As one Chinese Church leader says it:

When there is a real resistance, the teams do not try to push the Gospel. They just go on their knees and wait on the Lord to hear His voice for direction on what to do. They just keep silent and continue to fast and pray. This is a very practical part of their lives.

Is that how our churches today—no matter what kind they might be—do anything?

Our Western tendency to compartmentalize the Faith is strange to Asian believers. They have a far more holistic view of the Gospel and how it plays out in everyday life. From Diane's post:

Brother Denny (an American missionary interviewer): How do the Acts of the Apostles compare to the Chinese church? What does the Chinese church believe about the Book of Acts?

Brother Paul (Chinese): They would say, "We are there. It is our normal Christian life." They believe that Acts is a demonstration of the normal Christian life. It is a testimony of the resurrected Christ, and He is still the same today. They do not believe that miracles have passed away.

Brother Ren (Chinese): We have to understand that the Gospel that is preached in China, is a little bit different. The emphasis is not only intellectual and mental messages. It is fifty percent preaching, fifty percent showing the power of the Gospel. There is always an expectation and readiness for miracles. It is normal that anytime when the message of the Gospel is pronounced, there is going to be a demonstration of the power of God in that situation. People can see clearly that Jesus is the Son of God, and that He is the Savior of the world. The church of China is not praying for miracles, but they are living in miracles. It is like [Brother] Paul said: it is the normal Christian life.

While we continually argue the theological points of our own little factions, the Chinese Church is living the whole Gospel, not just the parts they like. The result is that God is growing the Chinese Church exponentially, while we American Christians bicker about one topic or another as fewer people care to listen to what we have to say.

Here is a Church that has none of the material available to them that we have. They have no money, no political standing, no cleverly-devised programs, no conventions, and nowhere near the dogmatic factionalism that we have. But what they do have is a faith that moves mountains and may very well topple the atheistic Communist regime in their country of 1.3 billion souls.

And what of the persecuted Chinese Church's view of evangelism? Well, they believe that the Great Commission comes first. What is unusual to Westerners is how they go about it.

In many cases, Christians are sent out to towns that have no Christian witness and the first thing they ask is, "What is the greatest problem in this village?" When they hear what it is, they immediately begin fasting and praying that Jesus Christ would prove Himself greater than the problem. Diane quotes the Chinese Christians (from the quote above) saying that two young women went into a town and were told that a demon-possessed man had the townspeople under his thumb. They confronted the man in the name of Jesus, cast out his demons, and led him to Christ. Then that same man joined the two women as they spoke to the entire village about Jesus. All three hundred in that village repented and gave their lives to the Lord.

Does that model seem familiar? We saw it in Jesus' ministry and the ministry of the apostles in Acts. In fact, the Lord Himself advocated this type of ministry when He said:

And proclaim as you go, saying, 'The kingdom of heaven is at hand.' Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. You received without paying; give without pay. Acquire no gold nor silver nor copper for your belts, no bag for your journey, nor two tunics nor sandals nor a staff, for the laborer deserves his food. And whatever town or village you enter, find out who is worthy in it and stay there until you depart. As you enter the house, greet it. And if the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it, but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. And if anyone will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet when you leave that house or town. Truly, I say to you, it will be more bearable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town. "Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Beware of men, for they will deliver you over to courts and flog you in their synagogues, and you will be dragged before governors and kings for my sake, to bear witness before them and the Gentiles. When they deliver you over, do not be anxious how you are to speak or what you are to say, for what you are to say will be given to you in that hour. For it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. Brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death, and you will be hated by all for my name's sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.
—Matthew 10:7-22 ESV

Should we be surprised at the quote that opened this post? We out-thought the Lord here in America. We told His Spirit that we can do it all in our own cleverness or we told Him that He could not work that way anymore. Either way, we seem to have lost Him here in America. He took His fire to China.

I can't read Diane's post and not get excited. Unfortunately, I'm excited for China and not for America. We can't seem to see what we've done to ourselves because of our overt anti-supernaturalism and our reliance on our own human reasoning. Meanwhile, the Chinese Church is receiving the blessing of God while they live out the whole Gospel, or as they say, "The normal Christian life."

I don't know about you, but I want that same kind of "normal Christian life" here in America. What has happened to the Church here is criminal, but we brought it on ourselves. It will take the Holy Spirit of God to bring His torch back our way, but He'll only do that if we are ready.

Lord Jesus, make us all ready.

Tags: China, America, Revival, Holy Spirit, Evangelism, Church, Faith, Christianity, Jesus, God