Tomorrow night, at 7pm, our Gospel Meeting with Barry Grider will begin. I hope you are planning on being there. More than that, I hope you have reached out to invite someone to be there with you. None of us knows the future, but if you’ve lived long enough, you can sort of get a feel for which way the wind is blowing, and for one reason or another, for the past few years, it has felt like our country is in the beginning stages of a spiritual revival. America’s history has had a series of ebbs and flows in our national relationship with God. The so-called “great awakening” that blossomed in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War resulted in a tremendous upswing in “church attendance” and Bible devotion to a degree not seen in earlier years. Secularism eventually roared back, but in the aftermath of the second World War, another era of revival swept over the nation. It lasted until the late 60s counterculture revolution captured too many hearts and minds. Another mini-revival happened in the 1980s, as a spirit of patriotism led people back to church houses. As before, it didn’t last, and in its place has been a culture of extreme secularism, humanism, and fervent anti-religiosity.
The winds, it seems, may be changing.
The reasons are manifold but discussing them is not the point of this. My point now is for us to open our sails and ride those winds. People are hungering and thirsting after righteousness. People are seeking answers. After a generation (or more) of kids being told “there is no Truth. Nothing matters. Reality is whatever nonsense you want it to be,” it’s no wonder we now have a generation of kids who are anxious, wavering, and confused. As is often the case, the present generation is reacting to and rejecting the bad lessons taught by those before them. That means they are swinging the pendulum away from the stupidity of “your truth and my truth.” They are rejecting the notion that nothing matters, that nothing is real, that there is no standard of morality. They are rejecting the fickle, unpredictable, and ever-changing moralizing of godless people, who decide what is right and wrong on whims, and who change their definitions of what is right and wrong based on arbitrary decisions.
People need the stability of a Divine Standard. People need the morality that comes from a perfect God. Without it, you can expect a generation of anxious kids to be bred. Today, I think people are waking up to how foolish things have been lately. In that case, they are seeking God. Many are seeking Him without even knowing they are seeking Him.
That’s where we come in.
We have the answers. We have Truth. We have God, Christ, and His church… or, rather, He has us, and He has sent us into the world to evangelize. Lately, it’s been hard to do so. America has been pretty “religiously-apathetic.” My prayer is that the winds are changing and people are becoming “religiously-curious.” That’s one step away from where people need to be, which is “religiously desperate,” but it’s a step in the right direction.
What we need to do is give those people a little push.
Who can you invite to hear the Gospel tomorrow night, Saturday night, and this Sunday morning? Invite them. Five years ago, you might have gotten a quick “no.” Today? You never know, they may feel the winds of spiritual revival at their backs, and they may be needing you of all people to give them that push they need to hear the Truth, to know the Gospel, to obey Jesus, and to become a child of God.
~Matthew