(Jeremiah 32:36-41, Ezekiel 36:22-28; Romans 12:1-2)
In October, we’re going to be participating in an initiative called Pray31. The men who’ve launched this are hoping to get one million Christians in this country to pray together methodically for the US every day in October. They aren’t asking for a major time commitment; the guide for this initiative is what they’ve called the “US Prayer Atlas,” which gives two simple prayer requests per day. These requests are laid out through the month to get all of us praying for every US state and territory, for our national system and institutions, for the church in this country, and for revival in the land. I’ve ordered copies of the Prayer Atlas for everyone, and I hope everyone in the church will use theirs daily next month as we pray together for our nation.
Now, I think this is an admirable project, and I’m glad to have our church join with churches across America in prayer for this country, but I do have one criticism: I think the vision of the men doing this is too small. Their materials seem primarily concerned with public moral standards and whether the US is being governed according to biblical principles, and I suspect that if suddenly this nation looked a lot more like it did in the ’50s, they’d figure their prayers had been answered. Certainly, back then there were many more people in church, the mainline denominations were still planting lots of churches, and there was public respect for Christian faith which is now going if not gone. On the other hand, I had a colleague in Colorado who pastored one of those 1950s church plants; I remember her saying that when she got there, the church knew nothing about Jesus, because their previous pastors had never talked about him.
Donald Grey Barnhouse, who was then the pastor of Tenth Presbyterian in Philadelphia, read the signs of the times clearly. As Michael Horton of Westminster Seminary California tells the story,
Barnhouse speculated that if Satan took over Philadelphia, all of the bars would be closed, pornography banished, and pristine streets would be filled with tidy pedestrians who smiled at each other. There would be no swearing. The children would say, “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am,” and the churches would be full every Sunday . . . where Christ is not preached.
I think he was right. The Devil would as soon damn people through religion as debauchery, through morality as immorality; after all, people who are immoral and debauched are just likely to hit bottom and realize they need God. Moral, upstanding citizens are likely to think they already have him, whether they have any actual relationship with him or not.
We have to remember that God isn’t primarily concerned about making us moral people, and he didn’t give us his word so that we could extract principles from it to apply on our own. The Bible doesn’t call us to morality, it calls us to holiness and righteousness. The difference isn’t always obvious, but it’s profound. Morality is about outward conformity to a set of rules. Holiness and righteousness are about an internal transformation, a change of heart, resulting from being in relationship with the Lord of heaven and earth. I sometimes think that the chief effect of morality is to disguise our need for holiness.
Morality can’t save us, for the same reason that politics can’t save us: our problems are too deep, too subtle, and too devious to be fixed by human laws or solved by human effort. I know we talk about people picking themselves up by their own bootstraps, but have you ever tried it? Problems don’t solve themselves, and we are the problem; as Walt Kelly had Pogo say, we have met the enemy, and he is us. We cannot fix ourselves, and in fact, we can’t be fixedat all. We need something more: we need to be transformed. We need to be made new from the inside out. We need God’s law inside us, not more laws outside us. We need to be made holy.
This is something only God can do, by the power of his Holy Spirit. We are in Christ, and in him we have been made new; now his Spirit is at work in us making us what we already are. We have been removed from the authority of this realm of sin and death and transferred into the realm of righteousness and life, the kingdom of God, under the lordship of Jesus Christ, as Paul says in Colossians; but we’re still in this world, and it still influences us, as do the habits and patterns we’ve learned from it. And so Paul says, “Don’t conform to this world”—or as Eugene Peterson translated it, “Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking.” J. B. Phillips famously rendered this, “Don’t let this world squeeze you into its mold,” but that doesn’t go far enough; yes, the world pressures us, but we often go along with it. Don’t squeeze yourself into its mold, don’t let it file you down to fit, don’t give away those things for which it has no use. Don’t try to fit in with the world around you, and don’t let anyone else convince you that you should.
Instead, Paul says, “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Not “transform yourself,” but “Be transformed”—which is to say, let the Holy Spirit renew our minds, changing our perceptions, our understanding, and our desires. This is spiritual open-heart surgery, rewriting the law of our hearts that governs our instincts and reactions, first thoughts and impulses. That’s the Spirit’s work, to remove the law of this world from our hearts and replace it with the law of God. It’s the Spirit of God who teaches us to see the will of God, and to understand that his will is good and well-pleasing and perfect, when our sinful human minds don’t see his will as any of those things, much of the time.
This is what revival is, and what revival means: God doing this work in people’s hearts. This is why, if we would see revival, we need to pray, and why I believe the Pray31 initiative is important. That’s not to say we don’t have other work to do if revival is to come—but we don’t know exactly what it is, only God does, because none of it is by our design. This is also why revival can come even when there seems to be no hope, to even the driest of dry bones. It can be easy to be pessimistic about the direction in which our country and this world are going; I’m far from the only one (on either side of the political aisle) who’s lost any faith that our government or our political system can or will make things much better. But God can. That’s not to say that we should desire revival as a means to achieving a political agenda; it’s to say that our need goes far beyond and far deeper than any political agenda. Government can’t address it; but God can.