An Ache for Awe

Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and signs were being performed through the apostles.
—Acts 2:43

The mainstream media has discovered the empty pew. Everywhere I turn online, publications weigh in to explain dwindling church attendance in the United States. The pile-on of doom has been so intense of late, you wonder if the reporting verges on glee as one more despised institution crumbles into dust.

To every article I encounter, I post the same comment. It’s a quote from British/American revivalist Leonard Ravenhill:

You never have to advertise a fire.

This past week amplified the truth of that quote as people around the United States flew, drove, bicycled, and walked, sometimes hundreds of miles, to dwell in the shadow of the moon. The April 8, 2024, total eclipse captured the imagination of millions seeking a rare experience, an awesome thrill irreproducible via AI, CGI, Apple Vision Pro, or a vivid imagination. It was a cosmic event too big, too wondrous to ignore.

Call it a “fire in the sky.”

At the risk of alienating fellow believers. I’m going to state what I believe is the obvious. No one is banging down the doors of our churches because, in far too many of them, the glory has departed. Whatever fire of God burned brightly within the church walls has dimmed or departed.

What has remained after this Ichabod event is whatever human beings can substitute. Manmade experiences fill the void. You get a rock band, a million dollar sound system of epic decibels, a half-million dollar lighting rig of retina-frying lumens, attractive people on stage, special effects to empower the sermon message, and voila! You have the average megachurch meeting. Ramp that up now and then for a “special event” to pull in the lost, and now you’re cooking with FIRE.

Except none of this is the fire of God, the Spirit He promises to all who believe. The Spirit whose presence in their midst stirred the early Church to awe.

Too critical?

I wonder how long it took the priests of the Temple in Jerusalem to realize something was amiss. They’d killed that troublemaker Jesus, so they must have thought their troubles were over. Except some vandal tore the temple curtain that restrained the overwhelming glory of God’s Presence, exposing sinful men like themselves to the Shekinah, which at one time was instant death for the unprepared.

Except nothing. Nothing happened because, at the death of Jesus, the barrier that separated God from the unwashed masses disintegrated and the Shekinah glory of God no longer dwelt in temples built of stone but in sanctified hearts made by God Himself in His image. (More on this here.)

Do you think the priests noticed? Was the Temple colder? Emptier? Do you think they changed their rituals after God left? Or did they go on like nothing happened, sewing the curtain, and reverting to business as usual, unaware that they had become superfluous?

Do you think the priests felt the old fire return when Spirit-filled believers began to meet in the Temple? Did the presence of those born-again, fire-filled souls ignite in them a desperate thirst for what they had lost?

People need awe. People are desperate for the fire of God made manifest in their lives.

Are we failing this lost generation because we ourselves have lost the fire? Would we know if we had? Or would we go on substituting manmade experiences in an effort to keep the masses from missing the genuine fire that once burned brightly?

I ask this because rekindling that spiritual fire is the only answer to dwindling church attendance. And it absolutely boggles my mind that I can go into the comment section of any of these “Why is the Church in America losing attendance?” laments only to find a million excuses and countless solutions, and yet the answer given is NEVER “We need a reinvigoration by the Holy Spirit.”

Why? Because too many church leaders today have never had the Holy Spirit fall on them in that fire-filled way. They’ve never seen a genuine revival, the kind that would at one time sweep the world now and then. They’ve never seen the charismatic gifts of the Spirit in genuine operation (in fact, many have misguidedly crusaded against them).

So all or our offering of awe becomes manmade. We’ve substituted manmade smoke and mirrors for Spirit-sourced signs and wonders. We read the second chapter of Acts, and our response is “More strobe lights.”

People are dying for the kind of movement of God in their lives that the Bible holds up as the normal Christian experience. They’re desperate for healing for their diseases. They’re desperate for deliverance from their afflictions. They’re desperate for a move of God in their impossible situation, whatever it might be. They’re desperate.

Where is the fire of God? Church leaders need to start asking this and doing what it takes to answer it. Because when someone finally figures this out, we won’t need a church marketing campaign anymore because people will be beating down the doors to experience true, Spirit-filled fire.

Eclipse image © Bill Kilgallon. Used by permission.

Many reading know that Cerulean Sanctum has been moribund since I signed off about seven years ago. I wrote about my wife’s illness and its impact on our lives. We later had a terrible 2019 where she spent most of the year in and out of hospitals, only for us to finally find some calm as 2020 started. We all know what happened next.

But, praise God, my wife is coping better and is moving into new horizons helping others with mental illness. Our son is grown and graduated college. I find myself with more free time and more opportunities to think and pray deeply.

So, perhaps I will blog now and then on issues facing the Church in the America, because God knows they are piling up and the solutions some are offering are truly whack-a-doodle.

Father God, bring your holy Fire. Maranatha!

Pray for Cec

Earlier this week, Cecil Murphey, the well-known and highly prolific Christian author, lost his home to fire. Even more tragic, his son-in-law perished in the blaze.

Many Christian writers today consider Cec their mentor. He’s helped dozens of writers get their start in the biz. Few in the authorial ranks have amassed the wealth of wisdom Cec possesses.

Please take the opportunity this weekend to pray for the Murphey family in the midst of this doubly-tragic loss.

Leonard Ravenhill

Matt Self over at The Gad(d)about, besides having the common sense to pick drums over all other musical instruments, also has the brains to quote Leonard Ravenhill. Good for Matt. The American Church needs to hear more Ravenhill.

If you haven’t been around Cerulean Sanctum very long, you’ll get to know Ravenhill soon enough. He and A.W. Tozer are the “patron saints” of this blog. No one in the last century wrote blistering words like Tozer and no one preached with more fire than Ravenhill. That they were friends in real life is the icing on the cake.

I don’t do a lot of imploring on this blog, but if you’ve never heard Ravenhill preach, I implore you to go to SermonIndex.net and check out the Ravenhill section at this link (with videos at this link).

Ravenhill was more than a preacher, though; he may have been the last true English-speaking revivalist with roots that went back to the Welsh Revival. He passed away in 1994, and one of the greatest losses in my own life is that I mismarked a calendar and missed him preaching at a local church. He passed away not too long afterward.

Yet he lives on in his teaching tapes, and most of them are incendiary. Not only did Ravenhill handle the Scriptures in a way unmatched today, but he could draw parallels and bring two disparate Biblical concepts together like no other preacher I’ve ever heard. He not only knew the ins and outs of the Bible, but hundreds of hymns, too. Best of all, he had a solid understanding of how the charismata work today. He was the total package. Listening to him is so convicting I find it hard not to keep from rending my clothes and pouring ashes on myself. If you want to know that “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” may have sounded like to Jonathan Edwards’ listeners, check out few of the highest-rated Ravenhill sermons on SermonIndex.net, especially those before he was slowed by a stroke in the mid-1980s.

God knows that we need another like him to rouse the Church in 2006.

And though it’s a shame to limit the breadth of Leonard Ravenhill’s wisdom to a few zingers, I’ll end with some of his more pithy statements:

The only time you can really say that ‘Christ is all I need’ is when Christ is all you have.
If Jesus had preached the same message that ministers preach today, He would never have been crucified.
A popular evangelist reaches your emotions. A true prophet reaches your conscience.
The last words of Jesus to the church (in Revelation) were ‘Repent!’
A true shepherd leads the way. He does not merely point the way.
Your doctrine can be as straight as a gun barrel…and just as empty!
John the Baptist never performed any miracles; yet, he was greater than any of the Old Testament prophets.
I doubt that more than two percent of professing Christians in the United States are truly born again.
Our God is a consuming fire. He consumes pride, lust, materialism, and other sin.
There are only two kinds of persons: those dead in sin and those dead to sin.
[Concerning the darkness that has enveloped most of Christendom:] When you’re sitting in a dark room, you can either sit and curse the darkness, or you can light a candle.
Children can tell you what Channel 7 says, but not what Matthew 7 says.
Some women will spend 30 minutes to an hour preparing for church externally (putting on special clothes and makeup, etc.). What would happen if we all spent the same amount of time preparing internally for church, with prayer and meditation?
Maturity comes from obedience, not necessarily from age.
What good does it do to speak in tongues on Sunday if you have been using your tongue during the week to curse and gossip?
The Bible is either absolute or it’s obsolete.
Why do we expect to be better treated in this world than Jesus was?
Today’s church wants to be raptured from responsibility.
Testimonies are wonderful. But so often our lives don’t fit our testimonies.
[Concerning one of the new movements in the church that was causing a stir among Christians:] There’s also a stir when the circus comes to town.
My main ambition in life is to be on the Devil’s most wanted list.
You can’t develop character by reading books. You develop it from conflict.
When there’s something in the Bible that churches don’t like, they call it ‘legalism.’
We can’t serve God by proxy.
We must do what we can do for God before He will give us the power to do what we can’t do.
There’s a difference between changing your opinion and changing your lifestyle.
Our seminaries today are turning out dead men.
How can you pull down strongholds of Satan if you don’t even have the strength to turn off your TV?
Everyone recognizes that Stephen was Spirit-filled when he was performing wonders. Yet, he was just as Spirit-filled when he was being stoned to death.
If a Christian is not having tribulation in the world, there’s something wrong!
[Concerning the fixation that today’s church has with numbers, with growth at any price:] The church has paid a terrible price for statistics!
Any method of evangelism will work if God is in it.
Church unity comes from corporate humility.
You can have all of your doctrines right, yet still not have the presence of God.
Many pastors criticize me for taking the Gospel so seriously. But do they really think that on Judgment Day Christ will chastise me, saying, ‘Leonard, you took Me too seriously’?
You can know a lot about the atonement and yet receive no benefit from it.
If the whole church goes off into deception, that will in no way excuse us for not following Christ.
You never have to advertise a fire. Everyone comes running when there’s a fire. Likewise, if your church is on fire, you will not have to advertise it. The community will already know it.