Another Great Awakening About to Start?
I think we may be on the precipice of something special.
Could it be? Can it be? Another great awakening? As I travel and talk to church leaders all across the nation I am seeing growing evidence of a movement toward unprecedented prayer, church unity, personal purity and a renewed zeal for evangelism…all the stuff that revivals are made of.
Just a few weeks ago I gathered with forty other ministry leaders in Kansas City at Fellowship of Christian Athletes headquarters. Here, we prayerfully brainstormed ways of mobilizing disciple-multiplying teenagers on every high school and middle school in America. It was amazing.
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As we shared stories of what God was doing through our respective ministries and prayed for wisdom and connecting points to get the mission accomplished together, the place was electric and powerful with God's presence. It really felt like God had been using the economic distress that many ministries have endured over the last few years to strip away much of the goofy "can we really know truth?" discussions of epistemology and new age mutant ninja gnosticism and replaced it with an emphasis on intercession, relational unity and effective peer-to-peer student evangelism.
There's nothing like a lack of cash to get church-focused ministries back to the basics. Take my word for it. The weight of the financial burden has driven some ministries out of business and other ones down to their knees in prayer. But it is in this climate of prayer and utter dependence on God where spiritual movements are born.
Let me give you some more evidence that God may be up to something BIG. In the last twelve months we have seen over 25,000 teenagers, youth leaders and adults join our "Live THE Cause" facebook page, committing to make disciples who make disciples with their friends, in their neighborhoods and at their schools. I am consistently blown away at the stories of changed lives that are being told from teenagers and youth leaders all over America who are living THE Cause in powerful ways.
But it's not just the teen-focused ministries that are telling these amazing stories. I'm hearing the rustling of God's Spirit toward revival from all sorts of ministries from my missions focused friends to local church pastors to college ministry leaders.
The 1st Great Awakening took place in the late 18th Century and was lead by guys like John Wesley, George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards. We are long overdue for another nation-wide revival. It is time for the Bride of Christ to rise up and spread the love and message of Christ with holy abandon. It's time for a new generation of godly men, women, boys and girls to rise up and lead the way for an Acts-like movement of God's Holy Spirit on every campus, in every neighborhood and on every job site.
2 Peter 1:3 reminds us that, "His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness." This means that we don't have to wait for, beg for or wish for revival. It is ours for the taking. We must seize it in faith. We must yield to God's Spirit who is in us and who is working for revival by helping us to realize that God has already given us everything we need for a godly life (aka "revival!")
Let us seize the day. Let us lead the way.
