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Unstopping the Wells of Revival: Walking in the Light, Sin & Confession

Tuesday online prayer rooms 
8am prayer 30min
9am prayer 60min

This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all[b] sin.

If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us.

1 John 1:5-10

In his letter, John writes about related doctrines that are vital in the spiritual lives of Christians and of the church. That John begins his letter this way indicates that these are doctrines core to real Christianity; standing at the very heart of the lived experience of vital Christians. In other words, they are recovered and rediscovered experientially in every revival. 

For many of us, at first glance, the doctrines are so simple that we pass right over them. Some of us learned them in Sunday school and feel we’ve moved on from them. Or they are so simple and basic that we don’t bother to teach them in church. They also stand in contradiction to the implicit creed of our post-Chrstian, secular age. Talk about them for any length of time in a room full of secular New Englanders and you will feel uncomfortable. 

Whatever the reason, these doctrines have been covered over by the rubbish of the Philistines. And we must recover them, rediscover them, and live them. The Holy Spirit will honor this by releasing wells of living water and causing our cups to run over with the life of God. 

Here they are:

1. God is LIGHT and we SIN. John tells us “God is light,” and expands by saying, “in him is no darkness at all.” In our current moment, we have utterly lost sight of the absolute holiness of God – but look at any instance in the scripture where human beings came into contact with God – be it Israel at Sinai, or Isaiah in the temple, or shepherds and the Angels (not even God…just messengers) and you will see holy reverence and fear. The brightness of the glory of God immediately reveals the dinginess of our own lives. Isaiah cried out, “woe is me, I am undone for I am a man of unclean lips…and my eyes have seen the King.” (Isaiah 6). So often, we are comfortable with our sin. The reason for this is that we have not fully understood the utter holiness of God. John Calvin begins his Institutes by telling us that the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves are interrelated. It is only in light of the holiness of God that we can actually understand ourselves. 

The rubbish of the Philistines has covered over both the holiness of God as well as our own darkness, brokenness and sin. 

In 2015, Sarah and I experienced a season of personal revival in our lives. The Holy Spirit was poured out. Our walk with God went to a new level. Our passion, hunger, longing, faith, and obedience went up several notches to a new normal. But what interests me is what happened before this season of revival in our lives. It was an increased revelation of sin in our own lives. Things that had just seemed normal to us before came into the light of God. Stuff that was hidden, stuff that hadn’t seemed that bad. Pride. Coarse joking. Cynicism. Addictions. All of the sudden, it laid us flat. We actually wept over sins that hadn’t even bothered us before. This was the Holy Spirit. It was the light of God increased in our lives. The first thing the light did was reveal sin in our lives that we had been ignoring, overlooking, or unconscious of. This was preparatory work for revival in our lives. On second thought, it wasn’t really preparatory at all. It was revival. 

Here is what Norman Grubb writes in Continuous Revival about this. “The obvious main function of light is to reveal things as they are…Light is very silent, does not push or drive anyone away, but is inescapable to any honest person. You can’t lie to light. If you hit your toe against an object in the dark, you may mistakenly say that it is a table. But when the light is turned on in the room, you can no longer continue to say that it is a table if it really is a piano. Light just exposes the lie. God is Light. Silently, inexorably He shines on and in us, revealing things just as they are in His sight. Have you ever noticed the pivotal place given, even in salvation, to our response to the light? In John 3, we are distinctly told that men are not lost because of their sins (because they have already been atoned for) but they are lost for refusing the light.”

And so at the heart of revived Christian experience is walking in the light. Allowing the light of God to shine on us, even on our sin. Coming into the light and staying in the light. 

John says, “if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves.” We live in a world that is living in a state of constant truth suppression about human sin. In the post-modern culture in which we have been discipled, human beings are not viewed as sinful. And in our culture, we do not need to confess sin, either to God or to each other. As long as I haven’t hurt anyone else…it doesn’t count. But when we walk in the light, we are honest with ourselves and God (and others) about the sin in our lives as it is revealed to us. Grubb writes:

“Sin is a revelation. It is God who graciously shows us sin, even as it is He who shows us the precious blood… GOD shows us sin. We do not need to keep looking inside ourselves, This is not a life of introspection or morbid self-examination. We do not walk with sin, we walk with Jesus; but as we walk in childlike faith and fellowship with Him step by step, moment by moment, then if the cups cease to run over, He who is light, with whom we are walking, will clearly show us what the sin is which is hindering–what its real name is in His sight, rather than the pseudonym, the excusing title, which we might find it more convenient to call it.”

2. CONFESSION – As sin is revealed. The next step of walking in the light is simple: confession. Many of us see the practice of confession only in the movies, in the empty church, with the killer and the priest in the confession booth. But confession must be recovered by the church as a regular practice. We have to confess our sins to God, (and yes…to each other, in appropriate ways). Because when we do – when we agree with God about our lives…it restores us to a right relationship with God. Our sin has already been atoned for. Jesus died on the cross to forgive it. But when we pretend we have not sinned. When we deny our sin, we essentially turn our backs to God. We are no longer face to face with him in communion. 

When our kids were little, we had a liturgy in our house every time there was need for discipline. When the kids would do something egregious, they would get a timeout. We would tell them, Noah or Silas, you are getting this timeout because you did X. After the timeout, we would have a liturgy of restoration and reconciliation. We would ask them, Silas or Noah, “why did you get this time out.” They would respond…and when their response was accurate, we would ask them the next question. “What do you say?” They would say, “I’m sorry.” And then our response would be, “I love you and I forgive you.” We would hug and then we’d say, “now go and play.” 

We did this because we wanted to train them to understand that life with God is a life of walking in the light. We sin. We will sin repeatedly. If we want to have fellowship with God that produces revival and overflow in our lives, we must walk in the light. This means admitting, confessing and repenting of sin regularly, and being restored to face to face intimacy with our Father. 

For Reflection/Response: 

Are there sins or patterns of sin in your life that are unconfessed? Do you have a regular space in your day to “keep accounts with God” and confess sins as they come up. Think of a relationship with a family member…it is always better to deal with sin or issues as they come up, without allowing them to fester and erupt eventually. Same with God. 

Are there unreconciled relationships in your life? Is there a next step toward reconciliation that is in your power that you have not taken? Please note, reconciliation takes two to tango…sometimes it is not possible for us to move forward if someone else doesn’t want to. But it is important that we do what is in our power and control. 

Are there sins you need to confess to another person? James 5 says, “confess your sins to each other and pray for each other that you may be healed.” 

For Prayer:

Pray for the church (ourselves included) to walk in the light. Ask for the Holy Spirit to graciously search us and reveal to us anything that is not holy or in line with the light of God (Psalm 139). 

Ask for the same kind of revelation of sin that has happened in the church before and during every past season of revival. Ask for a revelation of the holiness of God and also of the preciousness of the blood of Jesus – which fully atones and covers over our sin. 

Let’s thank God for dealing, once and for all, with all sin, past, present, and future. Let’s pray for the church to move into unhindered communion with God as our sins come into the light and are confessed and repented of.

Unstopping the Wells: Judgement of God and the Fear of the LORD

Tuesday online prayer rooms 
8am prayer 30min
9am prayer 60min

So do not be afraid of them, for there is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs. Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.

Matthew 10:28-29

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.

Proverbs 9:10

The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.

Ecclesiastes 12:13

He is seated at the right hand of the Father

He will come again to judge the living and the dead.

The Apostles’ Creed

Another cardinal doctrine essential for revival is that of God as judge. The Apostle’s Creed declares of Jesus – “He will come again to judge the living and the dead.” Throughout the gospels, Jesus talks often about God’s judgment, often telling parables of the coming of the Kingdom that involve judgment. 

This doctrine of the judgment of God upon sinful humanity has been lost and covered over by the work of the ‘post-modern Philistines.’ The idea of a holy and righteous God who calls sinful humanity to account and evaluates each of us according to our deeds is a doctrine that has fallen out of vogue. It is written off as “hellfire and damnation” preaching and associated with oldschool, fundamentalist religion. 

I remember when I was on staff with InterVarsity at Brown, I would systematically avoid talking about anything related to judgment, hell, or the wrath of God. I was afraid it would sound unpalatable to starry-eyed millennials who believed they were fundamentally good and thought they would go out and change the world. (I don’t actually think my avoidance of the doctrine of judgment and human sin helped them or the world in the long run.) But it’s not just me, in our desire not to offend a world that doesn’t want to hear about it, the church has systematically avoided judgment talk for decades. 

But read the Bible, and it is plain as day. God is the judge of the earth. He will not leave the guilty unpunished. He will hold every human being accountable. In the mercy of God, this judgment has already taken place. All our sins have fallen upon Jesus on the cross, and if we fear God, and surrender our lives to Jesus as King…we can and will be justified by Jesus. But for those outside of Jesus, judgment remains. 

While the doctrine of the judgment of God was unpopular at Brown University, the alternatives are not good. The ‘Philistines’ have given us essentially two alternatives to a Biblical view of justice. The first is no judgment. From late modernity up until the mid 2010s, the western world jettisoned any notion of objective morality, based on God and his righteous judgments. In the place of Biblically grounded morality, our culture gave us, in Dale Keuhne’s words, 3 taboos. He wrote about this in an insightful book called Sex and the iWorld. Here they are:

1. You can do anything you want as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else, especially a minor.
2. You can do anything you want with another person, as long as there is consent. 
3. You are not allowed to pass judgment on any other person unless they break one of the above two rules. But it is okay to pass judgment on someone who passes judgment for any other reason.

In this frame of morality, there is no judge. This system of taboos became so intuitive in the West, especially the more secular edges of the culture like New England, that the idea of God as the judge of the earth was obscured and lost.

It is no wonder then, that in the mid 2010s, what we witnessed was a giant pendulum swing. At this time, the zeitgeist in our culture shifted fairly dramatically, as evidenced by the MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter, cancel culture and other similar movements. One of the things this reveals is that humanity needs justice – the human spirit cries out for it. We do not actually function well in a world without a judge. All of the sudden there was a revival of the idea of objective, external judgment. Instead of no judge, we went to a world with a million judges. Everyone with a Twitter account became a judge. 

What we need is not a world with no judge or a world where everyone is a judge. What we need is to dig out the wells the Philistines have filled in and recover the doctrine that God, and God alone, is judge. This is a fearful thing, as we will stand before him one day, we will be held to account. And it is a great relief, because if God is our judge, we don’t need to worry about what others think.

For too long, the church has cared too much about what the world thinks. It is time to stop that. It is time to fear God, the just and merciful judge of the whole earth. Because as Martyn Lloyd Jones says, “fear Him, and you won’t need to fear anything else.” For too long we have lost track of this glorious doctrine of God as the judge. It is time for us to remember and recover it.

For Reflection:

What makes you uncomfortable about the idea of God as judge? What do you find relieving about the idea of God as judge? Where do you fall on the spectrum of having lived as though there is no judge or a million judges? What does it look like for you to fear the Lord and Him only. 

For Prayer:

Let’s repent of our neglect of the judgment of God. Let’s acknowledge his role as our judge. Let’s give thanks that the penalty for our sin has fallen upon Jesus. Let’s ask God to bring his justice and mercy upon a world that has turned away from him. If there are patterns of ongoing sin in your life, repent and turn to God for mercy. If we say we have no sin, we lie and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins he is faithful and just to forgive us our sin. Let’s pray for those called to teach and preach and lead Bible studies not to avoid the clear Biblical doctrine of God’s judgment. Ask God to free you from the fear of anything but God, especially the fear of man and the opinions of others. 

Unstopping the Wells: Theological Barrier

Tuesday online prayer rooms 
8am prayer 30min
9am prayer 60min

“The heaviest obligation lying upon the Christian Church today is to purify and elevate her concept of God until it is once more worthy of Him–and of her.” 

A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy

“And without faith it is impossible to please God, for anyone who comes to Him must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who earnestly seek Him.”

Hebrews 11:6

“Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!“

Matthew 7:9-11

Our prayer assignment during this season is to “re-dig” and “unstop” the metaphorical “wells of revival” through prayer. As in the story of Isaac in Genesis 26 who needed to access water so his family and tribe could survive in the desert, the church today needs to access the same supply of life and power which nourished her in past seasons if we want to survive and flourish during this post-Christian secular decline. 

But, as Isaac comes back to the wells that Abraham dug in the desert, he notices that in the intervening years, the Philistines have thrown rubbish and dirt in the wells to render them non-functional. In like fashion, as we look back to the past, to the revivals that have brought the church out of its seasons of past deadness, we find “rubbish” blocking us from the life and power of God. The wells are there. The water is there. But the post-modern Philistines have filled the wells with dirt and trash. It is our responsibility to pray and to work to remove this rubbish. 

One very important kind of rubbish we must remove is theological. There are certain cardinal truths and doctrines of the faith that are so essential and vital that it is very difficult, perhaps even impossible, for revival to take place without them. These truths and doctrines were believed in the past. But in the intervening years, these truths have been lost and forgotten. The people of God might say that intellectually we believe them, but practically, as a whole, we are not building our lives and our churches upon them as theological bedrock. 

If we want to see revival, part of our work is to rediscover and recover these fundamental doctrines. To believe them again. To trust them. To apply them and act upon them. And to renounce the lies the enemy and the world have sold us. To repent where we have believed these lies and falsehoods. As Tozer notes in The Knowledge of the Holy, “the heaviest obligation lying upon the Christian Church today is to purify and elevate her concept of God until it is once more worthy of Him–and of her.”

The first truth to recover is about God. God is a sovereign God who is mighty and who acts in history. He does things. He intervenes. He does not sit aloof in the heavens, uninterested in us or our needs or our prayers. He is not the God of the deists. He is a person. With a name. YHWH. A God who hears prayer, responds, initiates, moves, and acts. History is the story of the acts and movements of this God in the lives of human beings. And that this is a God who hears and who answers prayer. He always has and he always will. When we pray, this sovereign God  hears us and acts and does things in the world that are noticeable and wonderful to bring his Kingdom. 

Well of course we all believe that, you might say. But do we? Do we really believe that? At the core of our being? If we did, we’d behave differently. We’d pray differently. 

Here is what Corey Russel writes: “sadly, a majority of the Body of Christ has been more impacted by the father of lies, Satan, who constantly bombards us with doubt and accusations against our Father in heaven. The enemy knows that if he can sow unbelief into our hearts and minds concerning who God is and how He feels about us, then we will never pray. 

Russell goes on to write: “This unbelief is typically rooted in two areas: God’s ability and God’s emotions towards us. Either we believe He is stingy and will withhold those resources from us. Many of us view God as a middle-class working dad with seven billion children; He has a good heart, but there are so many demands placed on Him, and we are just another voice crying out for something. Others view God through the lens of their relationship with their earthly dad who was emotionally absent and unwilling to meet their needs. Without even realizing it, they attribute those same characteristics to God.”

For Reflection:

Where have you allowed the enemy, Satan, or the “Philistines” of our age to obscure the truth that God is a loving and able father who hears when we call and acts and intervenes in human affairs and our lives? How is this lie about God inhibiting your prayer life? The prayer life of the church? 

For Prayer:

Ask God to give you faith in who he says he is. He is a loving God who answers prayer. He is a sovereign God who acts in the world and in your life. One of the most important questions Jesus ever asked was to Peter, and it is to us as well. “Who do you say that I am?” Ask God for revelation of who he is. Ask God to give the church greater faith and confidence that God is a) ABLE to answer prayer and b) WILLING to answer prayer. Ask God to pour this truth like gasoline on the embers of our collective prayer lives and ignite us into a church that is contending for revival. Knocking on the door of heaven, asking for spiritual nourishment for ourselves and the decaying culture around us, with a boldness that will not be denied. Ask God to restore to the church the vital truth that has been covered over by the rubbish of the Philistines – that God loves us and earnestly rewards those who seek him. 

For Response:

As you pray, either alone or with others, begin as Jesus teaches his disciples to begin praying – by addressing “Our Father in Heaven,” reminding yourself of who God is. Ask yourself honestly, “as I pray, who am I praying to today…is it the real God? The sovereign God who acts in his mercy and answers prayer? Or am I praying to an idol…an exhausted middle-class dad with 7 billion kids…or an absent aloof father who is unconcerned with me or those I love?”