Revival: 'be careful what you wish for...'

Are Christians prepared for the reality of what might happen if God shows up?

Over the last few years I’ve noticed a great interest in revival. Everyone is talking about it. A lot of Christians have noticed that the Western world is departing further and further from the Christian faith which gave it birth, yet hope that God will bring about revival to renew the church and the country. I am one of those Christians, and I’ve talked about revival before (e.g. this podcast from Feb last year). The Lord knows, we need a revival more than anything right now!

At the same time, I have to ask whether these people talking about revival really understand what revival is all about. It seems to me that most of the people talking about it think that it’s something that will happen to other people. They seem to think that revival is all about having a flood of extra people becoming Christians and coming to church. It’s all lovely and everything, but it won’t really touch me - because, you know, I’m already a Christian. It will just be an expansion of the club we already have.

I think anyone who believes this doesn’t understand what revival is, not to mention being deluded about the state of the church right now. Recently, UnHerd hosted a conversation about whether we are looking at a Christian revival.

One of the panel, Liz Oldfield, made a fascinating observation (at just over 10:00 into the video):

I don’t think the church knows what on earth to do with those people [who have a new interest in Christianity], is quite hunkered down and high anxiety itself, in a lot of institutional crisis. A lot of Christians are not able to meet those questions with curiosity and openness and listening because of this kind of destabilised state that a lot of them are in themselves…

This remark is absolutely on the money. There is a real problem within the church right now. And I’m not just talking about the Church of England - which has many unique problems - but the whole church across the country. As she says, if hundreds of people starting flooding into our churches, the church wouldn’t know what to do with them. The church has a serious problem. If the church is to take revival seriously (and I hope we can all agree that we want to), then we need to take seriously the problems in the church right now and seek to repent where we need to.

What I’d like to do in this post is briefly outline a Biblical view of revival before going on to list some of the problems (and, indeed, sins) which I think the church needs to repent of.

A brief Biblical view of revival

The people of Israel would frequently turn away from the Lord and grow hard-hearted towards him, and God would sometimes punish them (e.g. sending them into exile), or revive them and bringing them back to himself to worship him. More often than not, it is both - a time of punishment was usually followed by a time of revival. This is a regular pattern throughout the Old Testament.

The word ‘revival’ doesn’t actually occur in the Bible per se, but the word ‘revive’ occurs a few times, notably in Psalm 85:

⁴ Restore us again, God our Savior,
    and put away your displeasure toward us.
⁵ Will you be angry with us forever?
    Will you prolong your anger through all generations?
⁶ Will you not revive us again,
    that your people may rejoice in you?
⁷ Show us your unfailing love, Lord,
    and grant us your salvation.

Psalm 85:4-7

This Psalm forms part of a group of Psalms which seem to have been written when Israel was going through some kind of crisis. Perhaps this was written during one of the exiles - it doesn’t really matter for our purposes today. The psalmist asks God, “will you be angry with us forever?” Throughout the Old Testament, the prophets continually warned the people of the consequences of disobeying God. Much of the Old Testament talks about the disastrous consequences of turning away from the Lord.

God, however, is merciful to those who turn back to him in repentance. This is a key theme in Joel, one of the prophets:

“Even now,” declares the Lord,
    “return to me with all your heart,
    with fasting and weeping and mourning.”

Rend your heart
    and not your garments.
Return to the Lord your God,
    for he is gracious and compassionate,
slow to anger and abounding in love,
    and he relents from sending calamity.

Joel 2:12-13

God will forgive those who turn back to him with their hearts - not just with an outward show of sorrow, but with a heartfelt repentance. As Joel says, '“rend your heart and not your garments” - turn back to the Lord from the heart (ripping garments was the customary way in those days of expressing deep grief and sorrow.)

“Ah”, you might say. “But the problems in the world today are only out there in the world, not here in the church. We in the church don’t have anything to repent of!”

This is exactly where I disagree: the church has plenty to repent of. Let me outline a few.

Secularisation

One of the biggest problems with the church is that it has succumbed to secularisation. In the words of Harry Blamires way back in the 1960s:

The Christian mind has succumbed to the secular drift with a degree of weakness and nervelessness unmatched in Christian history.

— The Christian Mind

The lives of most Christians today look very much like their non-Christian, secular counterparts - with a thin veneer of ‘God stuff’ thrown in. To my mind, nothing exposed this more than covid-19: the church largely became a mouthpiece of government ‘experts’, and led the way on masking, social distancing, vaccination, etc. There was very little distinctively Christian about the church’s response to covid-19 - even in ‘evangelical’ churches.

Bob Moran captured it so brilliantly in his cartoon:

Rather than thinking about how God wanted us to respond to covid, many churches simply went with what they were told. God became virtually an irrelevance - as I talked about in my post about paying lip service to Biblical authority. Many Christians now virtually live as if they were atheists.

This has been going on for decades. As Francis Schaeffer said in the mid-twentieth century:

May I put it like this? If I woke up tomorrow morning and found that all the Bible teaches concerning prayer and the Holy Spirit were removed — not as a liberal would remove it, but if it was really removed — if that happened, what difference would it make in practice from the way that we are functioning today? The simple tragic fact is that in much of the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ — the evangelical Church — there would be no difference whatsoever. We function as though the supernatural was not there.

— Francis Schaeffer, True Spirituality (1972)

Take a moment to let that sink in: we function as though the supernatural was not there. What a damning indictment of the church! But instead of weeping and repentance, the church continues as if there was no problem.

If the church is serious about revival, it needs to repent of its secularism.

Holiness & ‘cheap grace’

Another big problem for the church is that of holiness. I do not believe the church has the passion for holiness that God requires of us. I appreciate that some people will hear this as me saying “you’re not good enough” - but that’s not what I mean. Obviously no-one is without sin, I am not claiming that. However, if the church has become content with sin - or at least, certain sins - that is a big problem.

I believe the reason is because the church has bought into what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called ‘cheap grace’:

Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

— The Cost of Discipleship

Cheap grace says, “don’t worry about sin, God will forgive you anyway” - so you don’t need to worry too much about living righteously. This is exactly why Mike Ovey, late principal of my theological college, chose cheap grace as the theme for his keynote address at GAFCON 2013:

You may also read the script if you prefer - I would highly recommend watching or reading if you haven’t already.

Mike’s point is that the Western church has missed out the word ‘repentance’ from the gospel. Repentance is essential to the Biblical gospel, yet conspicuously absent from most gospel presentations today. Even in supposedly ‘good’, evangelical, Bible-believing churches. In my previous church, in almost everything we did - especially for children and young people - the gospel was presented as ‘Jesus died on the cross for your sins’. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it completely leaves out the urgent necessity of our response to the gospel. On hearing that message, most people go away thinking, “Oh, that’s nice, Jesus died for my sins. So I don’t need to change my life at all, and I don’t have to worry about being punished for my sins.” The message people hear is a message of cheap grace, even if that is not the message which churches think they are communicating.

Nonetheless, years of preaching this watered-down gospel have had an effect: churches have bought into the message of cheap grace themselves. You can see this in the behaviour which is tolerated in churches. As I said in a previous post, “if we don’t recognise the deeply offensive and serious nature of sin, we will treat it with a wink and a nudge until someone gets hurt.” This is why, as I’ve sad publicly before, I have encountered worse behaviour in churches than I have in the secular world. Bullying and manipulative behaviour is simply tolerated because that’s what the church thinks grace is.

If the church truly wants revival, the church will need to take the message of holiness seriously. As it says in Hebrews 12:14, “without holiness no-one will see the Lord.”

“Without holiness no-one will see the Lord.”
— Hebrews 12:14

Teaching the faith

There is one final thing which I want to mention. The church is failing dismally at teaching the faith to new believers and young people. I can’t stress enough how big of an issue this is. I can think of many young people who grew up in my old church who are now no longer going to church. I’m not sure how many of them, if any, call themselves Christian. If the church was a ship, this should be ‘red alert’!

It’s no surprise if you know what’s going on in youth ministry. In our old church I used to help out with the 11s-18s youth group (secondary school age), where there was a 30 minute Bible slot. I used to come back and lament to my wife at length about how we were squandering the opportunity. We only had a brief window of time - a few years at most - of these precious young lives, some of whom didn’t have Christian parents and didn’t go to church. And what were we doing with them through this time? Teaching them as if the Bible had little relevance to life; teaching them a few basic things which wouldn’t have stretched an intelligent 7-year-old! They certainly weren’t being presented with Christianity and the Bible as if it were a matter of life and death.

It’s almost as if the church has completely forgotten how to pass on the faith to the next generation. This is what motivated me to start Understand the Bible - I realised that people were simply not being taught the faith in a way they could understand. The overwhelming majority of churches today rely on sermons and small group studies to give people what they need, and simply assume that will be enough. They don’t think through what people need to know and how they can be taught.

If you’d like more on this, I wrote a piece on my blog a few years ago: The lost art of catechism. More recently I did a piece on Understand the Bible about discipleship which expands on what I am saying here.

It seems to me that the church, rather than reflecting on its failures with a little humility, is simply choosing to double down on the strategy of the past which has failed. I can’t see anybody saying that we need to teach young people (and new Christians) how to be Christian in all its fullness. Instead, we simply give them the ‘cheap grace’ gospel and hope that will be enough.

One of the problems I’ve run into with Understand the Bible is that people in the church genuinely have no idea that this is a problem. I find that I am trying to convince people they need something which they just don’t realise they need. They think they’re doing it all already! But the feedback I’ve had from people who have engaged is almost entirely positive, and many people have picked up on the fact that these things are simply not taught in the majority of churches now. If we are not intentional about teaching the Christian faith, people won’t know how to be Christians. It’s as simple as that.

If we are serious about revival, we need to relearn how to actually teach people what Christianity is.

Is it ‘game over’ for the church?

If the church does not admit its failures and repent, it is going to die out. It’s no good crying “revival” if we are not prepared to be revived ourselves! We must be prepared to be revived if we want others to be revived as well.

What I am afraid of is that there are too many churches and church leaders who have so bought into the current way of doing things, the status quo, that they are unwilling and unable to change. Of course, with God, anything is possible. However, I think the words of Psalm 95 apply to us:

Today, if only you would hear his voice,
“Do not harden your hearts…

Psalm 95:7-8

In the gospels, the biggest opposition to Jesus came not from the Roman authorities but from the Pharisees and teachers of the law - the religious establishment. At the time of the Reformation, again, it was the religious establishment who were the biggest opposition to the gospel message.

I fear that many churches and church leaders today are part of that religious establishment without even realising it. If we are serious about revival, rather than looking out at the world we need to be asking the Lord to show us our own blind spots and helping us to see where we need to change.

In the wonderful words of that hymn, O Breath of Life:

O Wind of God, come bend us, break us,
till humbly we confess our need;
then in your tenderness remake us,
revive, restore, for this we plead.

— Bessie Porter Head