In the early 1990’s, I was invited to be among several who shared at a one-day conference about the topic, What is the Spirit Saying to the Church? Reading this for the first time in many years, I recognize how relevant it is today. I share these words with you as they were presented over 26 years ago:
Aside from the ministry duties of my office, my wife and I work with a campus ministry with students from a local Christian college. In our experiences with these students, we have encountered the lonely and hurting, the abused and neglected. We have encountered stalwart faith and sexual promiscuity; consecration and alcoholism; pregnancy and abortion. Some of these students are from your churches. Some of them are your children.
Last November, the Lord called this ministry to additional times of prayer and seeking the face of God. This came after almost a year of my personal weeping and repentance before God.
We have all learned what it means to see God’s face as Isaiah saw the face of God and trembled because of his impurities. We have learned open confession and genuine repentance before God and man.
We have learned not to pray for our own needs, but to commit those once and for all to the Almighty and to trust Him who can and will do all things for us. Instead, we list the needs of others in intercession; for in intercession we experience the grieving of the Spirit and the broken heart of God, and we follow the example of Jesus who lifted up the needs of others above His own.
We pray for revival at the college, in our city, and in America. We intercede for the church. We call the names of faculty members at the college in prayer. We pray for each dorm and each director. We intercede for the leadership, the churches in the city, the seminary, and urgent needs that we become aware of.
We pray directly and specifically; we bind spirits of complacency, bitterness, loneliness, despair, greed, arrogance, malice, disbelief, and we do spiritual warfare.
We will soon begin prayerwalks through the city, because, just like America, our city needs to turn its face back toward God. Then we will follow the Spirit’s direction in evangelism.
True revival has come, revival that humbles us before God in repentance and confession; revival that breaks our spirits, destroys our aspirations, crushes our confidence in self and crucifies the flesh; revival that brings us before the throne of grace in recognition of our unfaithfulness and in heart-felt thanksgiving for our salvation.
As we have prayed, our eyes have turned toward America. We now grieve with the Holy Spirit over the rebellion of God’s people. We tremble as we see the coming judgment on the church in this nation for its complacency, hypocrisy, greed and arrogance; a church which has made its spirituality an enterprise, and has lowered our divine Savior into a marketable product which we sell like a secular business, instead of the Son of Man who, when lifted up above the carnality of the world, draws all men to Himself.
We have become a people fulfilling Paul’s words to Timothy—unholy, unloving, ungrateful, lovers of self, forgetting the meaning of holiness and sanctification. The Spirit says that prayers will no longer withhold divine action. God’s judgment is coming. The complacent will make no further progress and their deeds will be exposed before men. Many financial situations will not improve as God strives for man to rely upon Him and Him alone.
But God will preserve a remnant. True revival will come to the remnant which will have leaders but no self-seeking personalities. They will seek sacrificial service, not security; comradeship in Christ, not unholy communion; New Testament discipleship, not division and disbelief. They will be free, bold, unified, anointed, and wise in the Spirit. They will have discovered the essence of revival: an insatiable hunger and unquenchable thirst for righteousness.
They will be fiercely persecuted. The better half of this persecution will come from the complacent self-seekers within the church. But this persecution will keep the remnant humble and will not prevent their victories for the Kingdom.
A spiritual Jericho must occur which breaks down the walls that we in our flesh have built. Then God will send Nehemiah’s to rebuild our walls under His divine direction.
A modern day prophet says the following:
“O Lord, take Your plow to my fallow ground. Let Your blade dig down into the soil of my soul; for I’ve become dry and dusty, and Lord I know it must be richer earth lying below. For I’ve been living in Laodicea. The fire which once burned bright, I’ve let it grow dim. And the very One I swore that I would die for, Lord you’ve been forgotten as the world’s become my friend.” (Steve Camp, Living in Laodicea)
Hebrews 2:1 “For this reason we must pay closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it” (NASB).