Steve's Letter: "What is revival?"

When you read this, you'll be preparing for Thanksgiving or getting over Thanksgiving with the promise to go on a diet. I do hope you have (or had) a great Thanksgiving and are properly thankful to your heavenly Father who is good all the time, even when it doesn't feel like it.

But I'm not there yet.

No, no. I'm thankful. I'm just not anywhere near Thanksgiving.

As I write this, it's late September and I'm getting ready to go to Northern Ireland. Some pastors in the Belfast area read Scandalous Freedom and wrote over a year ago, asking if I would come and teach their people.

So I'm going there to "kill a Catholic for Jesus."

I know, I know. I said something like that at a church where I was preaching and one of the elders said, "Steve, trust me on this. When you get there, don't make jokes and don't wear orange. Okay?"

(Did you hear about the man who was walking the streets of Belfast late at night and was accosted by a thug with a knife? The thug stood behind him with the knife to his throat and asked in a harsh voice, "You a Catholic or a Protestant?" The man knew that if he told the thug he was a Catholic and the man was a Protestant, he was going to die. And if he said that he was a Protestant and the thug was a Catholic, the same thing would happen. Then he had a brilliant idea! "I'm Jewish!" he said. To his horror, the man with the knife said, "I must be the luckiest Arab in all of Northern Ireland!" Sorry.)

While I'm in Northern Ireland, I'm going to speak and teach at a seminary, spend a day with the pastors, and teach their congregations each evening.

The pastors told me that their congregations were quite "straight" and lacked the joy, freedom and power I had described in the book. They said that there was very little church growth and very little reaching out to the lost. I got a note from one of the pastors last week. He said that he was praying for revival and he was praying for the same thing for himself because "I need it so desperately."

Sounds like here, doesn't it?

I don't want this to sound too pious. (If you know me, then you know I can't pull that off without you laughing.) But I do pray each morning for revival and awakening in America and in so many other places where I have friends serving with faithfulness...but with little result.

When I was younger, I didn't understand what "revival" or "awakening" looked like. I had bought into the religious nonsense that it would be reflected in really serious and absolute commitment and obedience on the part of God's people (a good thing, I suppose). Then the nation would see it, be convicted of their horrible anger and rebellion at God, and fall on their knees, begging for mercy. They would become pure the way we are pure and, together, we would clean up the "bars and the brothels" and straighten out the country.

I was very young then. Those were the days when I still felt the world could be changed and revolutionized by our commitment, our obedience and our hard work. I could have sung the song Leighton Ford's quartet used to sing, Let's Turn the Tide for God.

I'm too tired and too sinful to expect that anymore.

It's not that I didn't try. I really did! I figured that if I got better and better every day in every way, God would use me-and anybody else who got better and better every day in every way-to change the world.

Do you know what I've come to see? Revival isn't about our sin...but God's grace. It isn't about what we do...but our expectation that he will do something at which we keep failing. It isn't about making others pure...but telling others that we aren't pure and that Jesus likes us anyway. It's the recognition that God is God and we don't have to be. It isn't about telling the world that we're right...but telling them that God won't be angry if they will go to him because of the cross. It isn't about pretending to be something we aren't...but being who we are, to wit, defined by him, his love and forgiveness, and his plan through us to tell everybody we encounter that God is a lot different than they supposed. It's about "shouting from the housetops" that his love is unreasonable and offered to anybody who will accept it.

Now don't get me wrong. Love does do stuff. The "bars and brothels" won't make the money they used to make. The political institutions will become (and this will be a miracle of major proportions) geared to service, compassion and integrity rather than power and manipulation. Abortion mills will go out of business. Wall Street will reform itself around biblical parameters of service and righteousness. Families will be restored. The lost will hear and rejoice in the exciting news of the Gospel. Christians will love one another and the world. The hungry will be fed. The oppressed will be shown compassion. Justice will be done. Wounded hearts will be healed.

Jesus promised that they would be the marks of the kingdom, the kingdom that will come when he comes. But he also said that the kingdom was, in a sense, already here...and that we could be the model of the kingdom to bring "healing to the nations."

But, frankly, that's way above my pay level. As I said, I used to ask God to grant me the power and grace to change the world. Now I just ask him to grant me the grace not to lose too many.

George Washington Carver, whose amazing work literally changed the world as he found wonderful ways to use the peanut to create so many important products (cosmetics, dyes, paints, plastics, gasoline, nitroglycerin, etc.), said, "When I was young, I said to God, 'God, tell me the mystery of the universe.' But God answered, 'That knowledge is for me alone.' So I said, 'God, tell me the mystery of the peanut.' Then God said, 'Well, George, that's more nearly your size.' And he told me."

I kind-of feel that way. I plan to keep doing something more geared to my level. I'm going to Northern Ireland (and anywhere else I go) to tell people that God is big and scary...but he's not angry. I'm going to tell them that Jesus said he had "fixed" it so we could run to God and he would welcome us, and be kind and gracious.

I just tell people that because of the cross, God likes them.

It might bring revival and renewal to those churches in Northern Ireland.

Then again, maybe not.

That will be okay. Ireland is a magnificent and beautiful country anyway and I'll enjoy the time there.

So I'm off to Ireland. But try to remember that personal "revival" doesn't happen because you're good. It happens because you're his!

He asked me to remind you!

In His Grip,