What Are You Praying For? How 'bout Revival?

I've been taking a wonderful class this semester all about revivals and awakenings that have occurred in the past, especially the role of students (teenagers and college students) in them. This has been easily the most exciting class I've had in seminary, with philosophy of religion taking a close second, believe it or not.

My professor is a man of God who prays hard and has a heart for God's work in students' lives, and he has shared with his classes that he feels that revival is soon to come to the church in America. There are all sorts of reasons to think this, too. For example, one thing that has preceded every single revival is moral/spiritual decline. You need only look briefly at a news website, such as foxnews.com, to see that this is increasingly true of our culture. Just tonight I see on that site's main page stories about the following: Anna Nicole Smith's death and the controversy over her daughter's paternity, Elie Wiesel's being attacked by a holocaust-denier, a man who kept the body of his homosexual partner frozen so that he could keep receiving pension checks, a Disney employee who acts as the Beast from Beauty and the Beast and has been arrested on child pornography charges, and a pastor in New York who committed suicide after being caught by the local television station engaging in a homosexual relationship and entering an "adult bookstore." Our culture is literally coming apart at the seems. Each institution is failing, from our schools to our families. We are certainly in decline.

However, this decline is not what I'm really after here. What I want to communicate is what my professor has said several times now to me. One other thing that has been common with every revival is that it was preceded by prayer, sometimes the prayer of a few and sometimes by more. This is not to say that God is in a box and does things the same way every time, but the fact that He has chosen to bring a refreshing of His Spirit when His people have earnestly asked Him for it should open our eyes. Can we expect that He will revive us now without our earnest prayer? I think the answer is obvious.

So, this brings me to the question: are you asking God on a daily basis to come refresh us with His awesome Presence? Are you crying out to Him to show mercy on our nation and people? I have been incredibly convicted that my prayer is too often inward and lacking the sort of direction that God would have for me. Would you join with me in beginning to daily lay our desire, our need, for His Spirit to come powerfully upon us, our churches, and our nation? It is time we shed the tears of brokenness before our God!

Wild at Heart - A Short Review

Let me start out by saying that this book by John Eldredge has literally been life-changing for me. I had heard good things about it before I read it, but I was blown away by the insight into manhood that was contained between the covers. I often felt like the author was writing about me, personally, and this is not limited to me. Several other men I've discussed the book with have expressed similar feelings. It addresses some of the core issues that Christian men face.

I learned quite a few things about myself and my standing with God through reading this book, but I'll save you all from a long post and just talk about the thing that has affected me the most.

For quite some time I've dealt with a sense of impossibility about my Christian walk, my spiritual life. That is, I felt that I never could measure up to God's requirements for me because there was something fundamentally wrong with me, as if at my core there still lay sin. Now, I'm nowhere near perfect, but I've been learning through this book what it means to have become a new creation in Christ Jesus. Part of what that means is that no longer is a Christian fundamentally broken because of sin at his or her core. Rather, a Christian is now fundamentally good. All that remains of the old self is what Eldredge calls the Traitor within who lies and cajoles to get us back into old habits of sin, and this is only a dying part, no longer what defines the Christian. God has made us good, righteous, and holy in Christ, and that is something to rejoice about! I find myself overcome even now as I type!

If you haven't read this book, please do. You don't have to be a man, either. Women would gain a huge understanding of men, as well as of thier relationships with men from this.