Life Matters - April 30, 2025
Is the Constitutional revival sweeping America laying the groundwork for a spiritual revival doing the same? Just a few thoughts on that subject…
From the beginnings of the Christian church in Acts chapter 2, to the present day, revival fires have been driven by speaking the Truth in Love. Even though conviction does not always feel like love until its truth is accepted; when one is convicted by an inner conviction, whether through hearing the Word spoken, or in the quietness of one’s communion alone with God; when Truth is fully accepted in the heart and mind, together with fully accepting and believing the Truth of Jesus Christ, His death for my forgiveness, His blood shed for my atonement, He Lives! has risen, for my justification, then the Love of Christ, pulsing in the heart and mind, cannot be contained. It must be shared. Biblical Love cannot be contained, is not to be hoarded for oneself. It must flow.
This is the heart of spiritual revival. The setting and the actual sequence may vary, but the settling in of the Holy Spirit is ever the same, His only variation being the tailoring of personal conviction or joy to the needs or rejoicing of each person. Truth, repentance, believing in Jesus to the salvation of our souls and a renewed life, always has been, and always will be, the fuel of revival fires, the fruit of the Holy Spirit’s presence.
We are created in God’s image. In His image we can receive from Him what He so gladly gives. In His image we live with an inner void that only He can fill. In His image when that void is filled with the Love that He gives we find that it is not meant to only receive. His Love is strengthened when cheerfully exercised. Jesus said it this way, ‘’He that believeth in me, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.’’ (John 7:38) We are not meant to be as hewed cisterns which stagnate or break. (Jeremiah 2:13) A flowing spring of water is always fresh. Always refreshing. To the thirsty.
Here is where revival comes in. To awaken thirst in those who have forgotten their need for it. And offer the drink of eternal life to those who thirst. To offer, to the empty, a fullness that overflows. Living water is what Jesus offers to all that come to Him. Where revival fires burn with thirst, there that raging thirst for Truth and Life is quenched at the refreshing fountain of the water of life. Where thirst is satisfied by He who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
Jesus Christ is The Way, the only Way, back to the Father to Whom Truth matters. Jesus warns us about those who come to the day of judgement, that final Judgement, depending on their own merits of goodness to be recognized and to grant admittance into Heaven. (Matthew 7:23) Our Lord’s response is telling; ‘’…I never knew you.’’ Did Jesus, who knows all, who spoke the universe into existence, (John 1) really not know who they were? Or does He mean; I don’t know the person you are describing?
I should think the latter to be the case. Because Jesus knows our spirits and desires Truth in the inward parts. Not our own thoughts about ourselves, but His thoughts. Not other people’s thoughts about us (though they may be right), but His thoughts about us in relation to Truth. Truth doesn’t always feel good. But when Truth is accepted into one’s heart and mind, the rightness of it effects even the way we feel about it and its messenger, the Holy Spirit, whether in a quiet time alone with God or with the help of another person. We sense its rightness, its goodness, its renewing power, its solid footing from which Life springs flow into the repentant heart and out of that heart to others.
Truth is at the heart of revival. Truth in the inward parts. Truth in harmony with God.
Truth is the ultimate target of he of whom Jesus said, ‘’…is a liar and the father of it.’’ (John 8:44) Truth has been under attack in America, even by its own government, for many years now and most especially by the Biden administration during its four year tenure. I am weary of the details, but suffice it to say that the LGBTQ+ debacle at the Biden White House (by invitation from the president) represented a departure from the God of the Bible by such a margin that there seemed no coming back from the brink of destruction. Back from the idea, as in CRT (critical race theory) that there is no Truth. (as reported by Charlie Kirk)
The U.S. Constitution, by contrast, was drafted upon the presupposition that the Bible, being God’s Holy Word, is the Word of Truth from which springs all else true and right. Truth is never abrogated by those who fail in its precepts.
The Trump administration is attempting to lift the dark veil of lies obscuring that truth in the Constitution and, by extension, the Bible, the Word of God. If they make some wrong moves, those wrong moves have no bearing on the Word of God except to prove it right again when it portrays us all as imperfect people. May we extend grace as they do their best to pull the nation out of this muddle.
May those who have lost Biblical knowledge, lost faith in its Truth, regain that knowledge and faith in its Truth. Is this not the groundwork of being revived? Revival grows in a seedbed of Truth, watered by the Word of God. May the pillar and ground of the truth, the church of the Living God, rise to the occasion. Let us not depend on any national government to do the work that the church is called to accomplish.
One more thought: If I can be forgiven, saved, and cleaned up…then it gives me a lot of hope for the rest of humanity…
Life Matters!