Do We
Really Want
Revival?
Dr. Shelli Jones
Baker
As
the 18th Century drew to a close, the
‘Holiness’ movement of the Great Awakening, once
arguably the world’s greatest revival, had waned
in zeal but grown into respectability. One of
its off-shoots was Methodism whose founder and
hero, John Wesley, was about to address its
governing assembly one last time.
As the elder clergyman slowly ascended
the steps of Oxford’s most
prestigious pulpit, the big stone church
reverberated with thunderous applause. But the
sermon they received was not
the one they were expecting. He never looked at
the one he had prepared; instead, he shared what
was weighing so heavily on his
heart.
He reminded them how he had once been
banned from speaking in churches like this one.
He had, in fact, been denied the very pulpit
that had been his father’s. But it is was only
after
he’d been shut out, that God’s glory fell upon
him. He went outside and stood on the only piece
of legal property he could claim in the
churchyard – his father’s tomb. There, he
revealed the fire burning deep within him, that
would kindle the
Awakening.
His
reward for that first sermon? Rotten eggs and
tomatoes hurled to his back.
The stately figure paused before
concluding. Gazing at the stunned faces looking
at him, his eyes brimmed. Then he rebuked them
for their denominational pride and arrogance and
comfort that had replaced the unquenchable
thirst for God that had marked their early
years. “I should count it a greater honor to
feel tomatoes on my back once more, than the
sound of your
applause.”
V V V
On
the eve of 2006, the Lord said this to
me:
Is it truly revival that
you want? A light of purity and holiness shining
on your sin, the sin of this generation? It is
far brighter than you realize. It will lay wide
open the secret sins and expose man’s methods
and the lies they tell themselves and even their
little children. They will resist me when I
strip them of their fantasies and traditions
that keep the multitudes from believing in me.
When I tear down the barriers they will be angry
before they are revived. Revival is a shaking.
But if I shake them, they will hate me before
they love
me.
I
wondered, at first, what he meant. But before I
could ask Him, He showed in a vision. A little
boy asked his mother, “Tell me again, how does
Santa watch us? And how is it that his elves
hide around us? Are they really
there?”
Looking her son straight in the eye, his
mother assured him that this supernatural
creature did indeed exist. He wanted to believe
her. There was a reward in it for him, if he got
the formula for perfect behavior exactly right –
even better gifts than he’d already gotten. And
his mother, who would normally never dream of
injuring her child, enjoyed the rare opportunity
to pretend, that comes once a year with the help
of merchants everywhere pushing the scheme to
its fullest.
As I watched, I recalled my own childish
joy in participating for about six years in this
same fantasy. I had believed it with all my
little heart, and sleigh-bells on the porch one
year fully convinced me. And had I not recently
enjoyed the Polar
Express book and movie, based on the theme
of holding
on to one’s belief in jolly old Saint Nick? Did
I not love all the rich tradition and beauty of
trimmed trees, stockings and holiday candies and
presents? Of course! I am still very much a
child at heart, refusing to let go of the family
warmth that Yuletyide
brings.
But
what was God getting at?
Then I saw it: We have
set the rules ourselves. We have built the
traditions. We have decided what is acceptable.
We dare not open the subject with Him. He might
not appreciate our carefully wrought traditions
and the delicate psychological balance involved
in an adult and a child playing at make-believe
together. We particularly don’t want to hear
about it from the pulpit. Preachers, butt out!
We must allow Santa his place in Jesus’ special
day.
In
most American homes Santa, not Jesus, is king.
The manger scene is soon forgotten, buried under
stacks of crumpled
wrapping paper and discarded ribbons. Santa
reigns! The smell of roast turkey lures everyone
away from new
gadgets and gifts to the festival meal, before
the football game begins.
Whose birthday? Jesus? The ‘boring’
little baby in the crèche set? No, this day
belongs to the supernatural roly-poly wizard,
smiling and winking, dressed in red. The one
with the magical reindeer and mischievous elves,
who brightens the bleak midwinter with marvelous
toys and gifts!
And
so we children of the “Me” generation – ours –
has produced the most apostate, immoral
unreligious generation of all time. Our
generation once boasted that God was dead. This
generation does not even know Him. Even
Christians, many of them, embrace the tradition
of Santa Claus and his elves to the near
exclusion of Christ’s nativity being the focus.
After all the shopping and holiday preparations
they have little energy left for Christmas
services or fasting followed by feast and
pageantry that once marked the solemn occasion
for centuries as a witness to heathen
populations around them.
As a child enters the age of
reason, he begins to cross-examine his parents.
Is it really true? And the parents, perhaps
remembering their own dismay at learning it was
not, re-assure him that it is. They re-tell the
myth, perhaps even punishing an older skeptical
child for “spoiling” the surprise for their
younger siblings.
What
is happening here?
At
their most impressionable age, young children
are forming their belief in the supernatural. At
the same time, they are being trained to trust
the adults who are demanding truth from them.
But the same parents who put such a high value
on telling the truth, are lying to their
children.
What we
teach our children about the supernatural will
form their belief system for
life.
What a child learns and experiences between
infancy and five years old is crucial to his or
her adult behavior, and much of it is
irreversible.
So
we must ask ourselves: are we enabling them to
believe in a supernatural Savior? Or are we
crippling them? Are we preparing their soul and
spirit to accept a loving, truthful, faithful
being named God? Or are we teaching them to
disbelieve?
By the time the average American child is
five, he or she has been assured that there are
three supernatural beings watching, assisting,
and rewarding them: Santa Claus, the Easter
Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. And for some
children in Christian families, there is a
fourth special reward time: the eve of All
Saints Day, when they dress up as ghosts and
hobgoblins (scary, but not really) to go
trick-or-treating.
Then our average child grows a little
older. He finds out that all his favorite
supernatural beings are nothing but
elaborately-constructed myths and lies. And if
they are sad about it, their parents mildly
rebuke them, saying that it’s grow-up time.
How do
the children really
feel about being lied to? Maybe there is forgiveness. But maybe
there are seeds of resentment. And maybe one day
those seeds will grow into teenage
rebellion.
Eventually each child adapts to the
truth, fits in calmly with his peers and parents
and older siblings. If he misses the fun of
make-believe, he will eventually have the
opportunity to re-enter that world with his own
children.
What happens
when the disillusioned child grows older
still?
When he reaches the age where he can understand
that God Himself came to earth and assumed the
form of man? That He did it to show all men how
to live?
That He ultimately allowed Himself to be
put to death on the Cross, shedding His Blood,
to free all men from the bondage of
sin?
To believe all that – to know that it is
not a myth but absolute truth – requires an
immense gift of faith. We want
our children to believe it, yet – have we made
it hard for them to do so? We want them to believe in
a loving Creator God who reigns in heaven and
sees all and knows all. But we have sung to them
lullabies of a toy creator who reigns at the
North Pole. “He knows when you are sleeping, he
knows when you’re awake, he knows when you are
good or bad, so be good for goodness sake!”
This
toy creator punishes bad behavior with lumps of
coal and rewards good behavior by answering a
child’s prayers (“Santa, please bring me. . .
.”) He’s always there, always listening, and if
you didn’t get what you wanted this Christmas,
there’s always next. Don’t worry, Santa will
never leave nor forsake you.
Except, he did. He’s just
make-believe. They all are.
By the time a child is old enough to
believe in Jesus, that He is a God of miracles,
he may well have begun to experience the trauma
and tragedy that are part of life. He may lose a
family member or a beloved friend. His parents
may have divorced. There may be hidden or
blatant abuse. But at the
time when he most needs a supernatural
Comforter, his intellect, (pre-conditioned
by a false childhood belief that we forced upon
him in fairytale heroes – false
gods), has ruled
out the existence of yet one more being he can’t
see or trust for sure.
He resents the very suggestion that he
now turn to God. And his parents are at a loss
to understand why. They complain to pastors and
counselors, “I raised my child up in the way he
should go! I had him in church every Sunday!
What did I do wrong? I love my son. I pray for
him all the time. But he just won’t
believe.”
They do not want to hear that they may
have ruined his belief system, when he was
three. That they crippled his “believer button”
when he was five, when he searched their faces
for the truth and were assured that Santa Claus
and the elves were watching and rewarding. That
when he was seven, they killed his believer
mechanism for good, when they punished him for
suggesting to his little sister that maybe their
parents did the work of
Santa.
He had
believed them about the supernatural in his most
impressionable years, and it had turned out to
be a complete fabrication. Why should he ever
believe them
again?
V V V
After all this occurred to me, shortly
before the grandfather clock chimed in the new
year, I heard the Lord say,
They want revival,
American style. They want my power, and all the
goose-bumps and thrills. But they do not want me
to touch their traditions or lay open their
souls. Wesley and Whitfield and Edwards and
Finney would have preached it. But if you preach
it, for this they would again throw their
tomatoes! Do they really want revival? Where are
my
Wesleys?
