RRI note:
This article appeared in the Destiny Image Digest on Reapernet.
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The Revival America Fears
by Larry H. Walker
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Hundreds and perhaps thousands of people die every week in North America
because of fear. It may never show up on their death certificate, but fear
killed them. “Well, I’m afraid to go to the doctor. He might find something.”
If they had gone to the doctor at the first telltale sign of a problem,
if they had submitted to the temporary inconvenience of being stripped,
poked, probed, stretched, and examined by a skilled healer, then perhaps
they would be alive today.
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Instead, they stagger into emergency trauma rooms with hearts in the
final stages of cardiac arrest; with pain-racked bodies swollen from the
effects of advanced-stage cancer; or with a brain slipping in and out of
a coma caused by the diabetes they never knew they had! What a needless
waste of potential. Many of the diseases they die from are treatable and
beatable today—that is, if they are diagnosed and dealt with without delay.
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What a harvest of sadness has sprung from our seeds of fear.
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Are There Rocks in Your Pockets?
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Of all people, Christians should be the most secure group of individuals
on the planet. Why? By definition, the lives of Christians are not their
own. They don’t have to have confidence in themselves. Their confidence
rests entirely in Another who told a crowd of religious critics aroused
by His unusual miracles, bold ministry, and casual intimacy with their
God:
My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow
Me: and I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither
shall any man pluck them out of My hand. My Father, which gave them Me,
is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of My Father’s
hand (John 10:27-29).
All that “first-person pronoun stuff” was a bit too much for the religious
elite of the day. They could put up with emotional teaching in the third
person pronouns about ancient scrolls or rabbinic traditions handed down
and honored for countless generations. But this supernatural stuff was
just too much. It was uncontrollable. It was spooky. Then He really did
it. He actually said out loud, right in front of everybody: “I and my Father
are one” (John 10:30).
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That’s when all of God’s cops headed for the rock pile and filled their
pockets with the tools of indignation to kill the thing they feared. What
happened next has a chilling ring of familiarity to it. It seems that the
same question is being asked of today’s angry critics of revival and renewal.
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Jesus answered them, Many good works have I showed you from My Father;
for which of those works do ye stone Me? The Jews answered Him, saying,
For a good work we stone Thee not; but for blasphemy; and because that
Thou, being a man, makest Thyself God. Jesus answered....If I do not the
works of My Father, believe Me not. But if I do, though ye believe not
Me, believe the works: that ye may know, and believe, that the Father is
in Me, and I in Him (John 10:32-34, 37-38).
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Who Says So?
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Amos the prophet declared, “Surely the Lord God will do nothing, but
He revealeth His secret unto His servants the prophets” (Amos 3:7). But
in an age when many Chris-ians don’t even believe that prophets exist anymore,
we have some problems. The truth is that the renewal or outpouring of the
Spirit that fell on the little Vineyard church at the end of an airport
runway in Toronto was accurately predicted by a number of prophets as much
as ten years before it occurred. The problem is that these people came
from “the other side of the tracks”; they came from those Charismatic people
who actually think the Book of Acts should be occurring today.
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God’s move in Canada and the sudden descent of the manifest presence
of God on the congregation of the Brownsville Assembly of God Church in
Pensacola, Florida, were predicted years ahead of time in public meetings
in Canada and the United States by Korean pastor David Yonggi Cho. “Well,”
the critics said, “we already know all about him. He’s the one into that
New Age stuff like meditation and visualization.” (But they are a bit puzzled
about how he ended up pastoring the largest church in the world through
the biblical power of prayer, meditation, and intercession in the Spirit.)
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Fortunately, God speaks to anyone and everyone who will seek Him with
all of their heart. Dr. Bill Bright was hungry for God. So hungry, in fact,
that he began a 40-day fast. He emerged from the fast convinced that a
great revival would sweep across North America before the end of the millennium—if
God’s people would repent and pray. He wrote a landmark book called The
Coming Revival, and prophets around the world took note. Why? This respected,
evangelical conservative, the founder of Campus Crusade For Christ, had
just published what they instantly recognized as a written prophecy inspired
by God. It turns out that the prophet by any other name was right!
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And the “River” Flowed
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Meanwhile, the creaky wheels of ego-driven religion kept on turning.
As God poured out His river of blessing on Toronto, the armchair critics
and the enemy of our souls poured out a flood of their own—from a safe
distance of course. (No respectable critic would be caught dead investigating
that place for themselves!) In the minds of some, that “Experience the
Father’s Love” stuff was asking folks to get just a little too familiar
with the Eternal Judge. Many “experts” in hallowed halls of religious scholarship
concurred: “That uninhibited worship and those physical manifestations
are definitely of the devil.”
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But even the critics were having a hard time explaining the thousands
of permanently changed lives and verified healings taking place in Toronto.
“Well, forget the fruit—it’s just not normal.” (Some leaders were undoubtedly
thinking, “What will happen to me if those lay people really begin to hear
from God for themselves? My God, we might have a second reformation! Where
would that land me? What if all that Charismatic junk is really true? What
will I preach?”)
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The “river” of criticism, rumors, and innuendo possessed what God’s
river did not: the haughty weight of man’s approval and the negativity
that is native to man’s nature. The unsubstantiated rumors did their work
well, and millions of Christians promptly shut the door on God’s work in
Toronto as a work of the devil at worst, and a work of the flesh at best.
But somebody forgot to tell God, because He stayed in Toronto where the
hungry hearts were.
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The Problem of Pensacola
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Just when the critics were preparing their victory banquet, God showed
up again in an Assembly of God Church (of all places—a Pentecostal church)
in a sleepy resort town in Florida. The critics pulled out their old argument
briefs preserved since their early days in institutions, thinking they
would put a quick stop to this upstart American version of the Toronto
“problem.” Then they ran into a real problem. Those crazy people were actually
preaching some of the same messages that the great revivalists of the past
were preaching! (Yes, the critics failed to notice the parallels between
Christ’s teaching on communion with the Father and the teaching in Toronto.)
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They were hard-pressed to deal with a revival bathed in vibrant messages
on Jesus Christ and Him crucified, the cross, the blood of the Lamb, the
resurrection and the judgment, repentance, and sanctification and purity
before a holy God. But the critics got their second wind when those nasty
“physical manifestations” occurred again.
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Then some real scholars showed up who read “the rest of the story”
behind the Great Awakening. They started pulling out evidence that the
spiritual fathers of the Methodist and Wesleyan movements, the Presbyterian
movement, the Congregationalist movement, and the Baptist—yes, I said Baptist—movement
had experienced identical manifestations personally and in their meetings!
Suddenly the writings and personal journals of George Whitefield, Jonathan
Edwards, John and Charles Wesley, and others were no longer the safe havens
of “orthodoxy” they appeared to be. They too had been infected by the “virus”
of the supernatural. It was almost as if God was really God. Maybe He is
supernatural after all!
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Things got worse when the secular media decided to do what the religious
media by and large wouldn’t do—visit these meetings themselves with an
open mind. Now the critics are really concerned. This “thing” has gotten
out of hand. People are getting saved by the hundreds of thousands; and
millions of people from around the world are visiting these places and
spreading the fire wherever they go. It’s just going to upset everything!
On top of that, every little church that embraces this river seems to start
growing, sometimes at an incredible pace. People are actually starting
to get saved at “First Church” ever since the pastor went to Pensacola
and Toronto and started “acting funny.”
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Don’t Shut God Out
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Yes, Dr. Bill Bright is right. God is in the land. Authentic revival
is in the land. If enough Christians will lay down their lives to pray,
then we may even see another Great Awakening sweep across this country
and bring genuine reformation of our nation!
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Jesus never instituted the office of critic when He laid the foundation
for His Church. He gave us only one outward signature to identify us corporately
to the world, and that was our love one for another. The critics of revival
are holding their victims to standards of righteousness that even they
don’t maintain. Their methodology seems to bear a striking resemblance
to those of lynch mobs, or a twentieth century witch hunt. Like the religious
critics of Jesus’ day, they bypass the obvious evidence of God’s approval.
They convict and condemn and so miss the most important question: What
if this really is God? What if He really does heal, deliver, baptize in
His Spirit, and work supernatural miracles today? What if we are wrong?
The answer is frightening.
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I urge you, brothers and sisters, in the name of Jesus Christ, to resist
every evil report and critical word that comes your way. Check the heart
motives behind every statement made about this revival, because God is
surely in this move. But He is certainly not behind the mean-spirited,
divisive, insecure, and derogatory rumors and innuendo being whispered
and shouted from certain quarters of the land.
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It is proper to question, test, and verify the fruits of this revival.
That is biblical and wise. John the Baptist had his doubts too, but Jesus
answered his questions with fruit that conformed to the predictions of
the prophets and the Torah: “The blind receive their sight, and the lame
walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up,
and the poor have the gospel preached to them” (Mt. 11:5). Don’t shut the
door until you open it wide enough to see the truth for yourself. You just
might see God at work in the midst of that which you fear...once again
giving sight, healing the lame and deaf, cleansing the lepers, raising
the dead, and preaching the gospel to the poor in spirit.
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This is the revival America fears. We don’t want to admit that God
might be at work here because we might find something we are afraid to
admit: There is more to God than I possess or understand. Sometimes our
human nature causes us to fear the diagnosis and cure more than our disease.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to shut the door on God. Like
the apostle Peter when he was faced with the choice of his lifetime, I
cry out to Jesus, “Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal
life” (Jn. 6:68). I live in my spiritual swimming trunks these days. I
just can’t get enough of God’s river, so I’m going over my head to the
deepest part, where the river flows deepest and fastest. If you want all
of God that you can get, don’t quibble over the temperature or who might
be watching. It doesn’t matter. It’s time to go swimming with your Father.
By the way, critics are welcome, and the water’s just fine.
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© 1996 ReaperNET
All Rights Reserved
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