THE CHURCH’S GREAT OPPORTUNITY
The darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining.
—1 JOHN 2:8
With America in such a wretched condition today, it’s easy to get discouraged, especially when so much of the church is complacent and compromised. Could it be that we have passed the point of no return? Could it be that our beloved country is beyond hope? Could it be that the only thing we have to look forward to is divine judgment?
Christian leaders have been sounding the alarm for decades, urgently calling on American believers to wake up, passionately calling for revival and reformation and revolution—or else. In 1978 Louis Drummond wrote The Awakening That Must Come, in 1981 Francis Schaeffer penned A Christian Manifesto, in 1982 John Whitehead wrote The Second American Revolution, and in 1985 David Wilkerson published Set the Trumpet to Thy Mouth, just to give a representative sampling.1 And things are a whole lot worse today than they were thirty years ago. Is it too late for America?
What does God say? What is the verdict of the Lord? Has he written us off forever—or at least, for a generation or more? There is certainly reason for grave concern. America is ripe for judgment, and we know that God’s judgments are right and just and fair. Have we spurned the Lord’s patience and mercy for too long?
That is certainly possible, and we do well to have a sense of urgency in our prayers and our efforts. But there is another side to the story, one that sees the darkness as an opportunity for the light to shine. We see this illustrated in a fascinating account in John 9, where Jesus and his disciples encounter a man who had been blind from birth. When the disciples saw the man, they asked, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2).
From the perspective of these Jewish followers of Jesus, this was a perfectly logical question, since sin and sickness were often intertwined in the Hebrew Scriptures and since some of their traditions suggested that a baby could sin in its mother’s womb, causing the child to be born with handicaps or sickness.2 So, these disciples wondered, which was it? Did the parents sin or did the man himself sin?
Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.” What an incredible perspective! It is true that this man had suffered his entire lifetime, but Jesus saw his hardship as a divine opportunity. He added, “We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world” (John 9:3–5).
What’s interesting is that Jesus never said that his Father made the man blind. Instead, without giving an explicit answer, he made clear that the man’s blindness was not the result of personal sin and that his condition should be seen as an opportunity for God to be glorified. Yes, this happened “that the works of God might be displayed in him.”
This is the perspective of light, which views every negative and destructive and hopeless situation as an opportunity through which the Lord can be glorified, regardless of the cause of that situation. In contrast, the perspective of darkness only sees the problem (he’s blind), only points accusing fingers (“Who sinned to cause this?”), only imagines things going from bad to worse (What possible good could come out of being blind?). As someone once said, “The optimist sees opportunity in every calamity. A pessimist, calamity in every opportunity.”3
We see this same contrast in perspectives in John 11, where Jesus learned that Lazarus, his dear friend, was sick and in need of healing. How did the Lord respond? “This illness does not lead to death,” he said. “It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it” (John 11:4). There it is again! The serious illness Lazarus was suffering from was simply an opportunity for the Son of God to be glorified. Jesus actually waited until Lazarus died before going to raise him from the dead. The Lord was determined to get maximum glory out of Lazarus’s sickness.
What do the disciples say when Jesus announces that it’s time to visit Lazarus, which would mean going to back to Judea? “‘Rabbi,’ the disciples say to him, ‘just now the Judean leaders were trying to stone You! And You’re going back there again?’” (John 11:8 TLV). To paraphrase, “Yeshua, this is not a good move. It’s dangerous in that neck of the woods! You’d be crazy to go back there.”
Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours in the day? If anyone walks in the day, he does not stumble, because he sees the light of this world. But if anyone walks in the night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him” (John 11:9–10). What an amazing outlook!
The disciples suffered from limited vision because they were walking in darkness, seeing only fear and death. Jesus viewed things through the perspective of light, which says: This difficult situation is actually a divine setup. This is an opportunity to display God’s power. This is a platform for the glory of God through which many will come to faith (see John 11:40).
This does not mean that blindness or sickness or premature death is necessarily a gift from God. Jesus never once said that.4 He never said, “God is being glorified through this man being born blind and remaining blind the rest of his life, or through Lazarus getting sick and dying and never being healed or raised from the dead.”5 Rather, blindness and sickness and death are platforms through which God could be glorified, regardless of the origin of those conditions. And so Jesus was showing us that whatever comes our way, however painful it may be and whatever its ultimate cause may be, it can be a potential opportunity for God to be glorified. Sickness is an opportunity for healing; death is an opportunity for resurrection; destruction is an opportunity for restoration. This is the perspective of the light. What, then, would Jesus say about America’s condition today? What is the perspective of the light?
Light certainly does expose sin and corruption (Eph. 5:7–14), calling for repentance and for acts of justice and morality (Rev. 3:19). And with more light, there is greater judgment (John 9:39–41; Luke 12:42–48). But light always seeks to be redemptive and restorative, and light can see a mighty apostle behind a murderous persecutor of believers (think Saul of Tarsus), and light can see a courageous leader behind a fisherman who denies the Lord (think Peter). And this doesn’t just apply to the apostles. Light can also look down on a rebellious, proud, sixteen-year-old, heroin-shooting, LSD-using, Jewish hippie rock drummer who steals money from his own father and lies to cover it up; and light can then use that person to debate rabbis at Oxford University and agnostics at Ohio State University and deliver scholarly papers at Harvard University and do outreach lectures at Yale University and the Hebrew University. The more unworthy the vessel, the more glory goes to the Lord.
Light sees hope where darkness sees despair. Light sees life where darkness sees death. Light sees potential where darkness sees pitfalls. What is the perspective of light when it comes to America?
While ministering in Korea in the summer of 2016, I saw an old friend from Germany, Walter Heidenreich, who was speaking at the same conference as me. I said to him, with pain in my voice, “So, what’s happening in your country? What’s going on with the Muslim refugees?”
I had been reading all the bad reports about Germany, hearing how some Muslim migrants were assaulting German women and causing lots of disruption, and I wanted to show him my sympathy. But when I asked him, “So, what about Germany?” his eyes got wide, and he said, with a great big smile, “God is moving in Germany! Thousands of Muslims are coming to faith! It’s harvest time in Germany! We could never get into Syria to reach these people, so God has sent them to us. What an opportunity we have!”
As Walter emphasized when I interviewed him on my radio show, we should operate from the perspective of faith, not fear.6 That sounds just like Jesus! As long as he was in the world, he was the light of the world. Once he left the world, this became our sacred responsibility. We are now called to be God’s light in this dark and dying place, and it is we who are to shine like torches, we who are to turn stumbling blocks into stepping-stones, we who are to redeem hopeless situations for the glory of God.7 By his grace, we can!
The story is told about an American shoe company that decided to expand overseas, sending their best salesman to start a new branch in Africa. Before he arrived, the company spent years in strategic planning, targeting this particular region as ideal for their global expansion and shipping thousands of boxes of shoes to their huge new warehouse. But within hours of his arrival, the salesman called the company headquarters in a panic. “Get me out of here!” he exclaimed. “No one here wears shoes!”
They flew him home immediately, temporarily halting their plans, and then met as leaders to reevaluate their strategy. After lengthy discussion, they decided that their plan was sound and sent their second-best salesman.
Once again, within hours of the second salesman’s arrival, he called headquarters with an urgent message. But this time his tone was very different. “We need thousands more boxes of shoes!” he exclaimed. “Nobody here has any shoes!” That is the mentality we must embrace here in the United States of America today in the midst of massive societal decline. Everyone needs what we have to offer.
Without a doubt, our nation is desperately sick, on the edge of spiraling into moral and cultural chaos. And without a doubt, much of the church is backslidden, having been seduced into apathy, lethargy, and carnality by a compromised, watered-down “gospel” and by the endless temptations of the age. In many ways, these are dark days for our country spiritually and morally, and we must not minimize the urgency of the hour. But rather than throw our hands up in despair, we should recognize that this is the perfect opportunity for the church of Jesus to rise up in the truth and power of the Spirit, bringing the message of life and transformation to our sick country. This is the church’s great opportunity. This is our time to stand.
On May 6, 2016, Harvard Law professor Mark Tushnet declared, “The culture wars are over; they lost, we won,” before recommending that the victors (meaning his side, the so-called progressive side) take “a hard line” against “the losers in the culture wars,” by which he meant conservative Christians, whom he implicitly compared to slave traders and Nazis.8
In response I wrote, “Perhaps, sir, your view of history is short-sighted? . . . Perhaps there will be a healthy pushback against some of these purported advances?”9 Perhaps this learned professor underestimated the vibrancy of the New Testament faith?
As documented frequently, Christianity is on the rise, not decline, worldwide. And there’s no reason that it could not be revived here in America. The Washington Post noted in 2015, “Over the past 100 years, Christians grew from less than 10 percent of Africa’s population to its nearly 500 million today. One out of four Christians in the world presently is an Africa[n], and the Pew Research Center estimates that will grow to 40 percent by 2030.”
The article also stated, “Asia is also experiencing growth as world Christianity’s center has moved not only South, but also East. In the last century, Christianity grew at twice the rate of population in that continent. Asia’s Christian population of 350 million is projected to grow to 460 million by 2025.”10
As for religious faith in America, notable times of spiritual decline have occurred throughout our history—as far back as the seventeen hundreds—and all were followed by seasons of awakening and revival. Professor Tushnet didn’t have to look any further than Yale University for quite a few relevant examples, as recently as the beginning of the twentieth century. Yale has had numerous seasons of awakening throughout its history.11
It is reported that in the early eighteen hundreds, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall wrote to Bishop Madison of Virginia, “The church is too far gone ever to be redeemed.”12 His observations were quickly swept away by the Second Great Awakening and seem shockingly ill-advised in retrospect. So much for the esteemed justice’s foresight.
One century earlier, Rev. Samuel Blair, who became chaplain of the Congress of Pennsylvania, stated, “Religion lay as it were dying, and ready to expire its last breath of life in this part of the visible church.”13 This was shortly before the First Great Awakening, led by the great philosopher Jonathan Edwards, that radically affected the society. “Religion” had hardly expired and breathed its last breath.
Perhaps Professor Tushnet’s words will be swept away by another great awakening? As I asked him in my article, “Are you 100 percent sure that this will not happen again? If not, you can hardly pronounce the culture wars over.”14 G. K. Chesterton wrote, “At least five times, the Faith has to all appearances gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases, it was the dog that died.”15 Indeed!
John Zmirak, a conservative Catholic columnist who holds a PhD in English from Louisiana State University, told me that when he was a student at Yale, his professors uniformly praised communism, making clear that communism, not capitalism, was the key to the world’s future success. They were quite confident that this socialist system was here to stay and that its sphere of influence was growing by the decade. Who would have imagined how dramatically and quickly it would collapse around the globe? And, Zmirak asked, who would have believed that the principal players who would help topple communism would be a former Hollywood actor (Reagan); a female prime minister in England, the daughter of a lay preacher and grocer (Thatcher); a shipyard worker who became the head of a Polish trade union (Walesa); and a Polish pope (John Paul II)?16
What does God have planned for America? What unlikely players is he preparing to use? Who can tell how swiftly and dramatically the tide could turn in our land? And if we as his people truly humble ourselves, confessing our sins, recognizing our need, and giving ourselves unconditionally to the Lord, what surprises will he have in store for our nation? Could it be that our greatest awakening is ahead of us rather than behind us?
Things look so bad today that many believers wonder if God can really save our sick nation. But if he truly is God (and he is!), the answer is simple: all things are possible to him (or her) who believes (see Mark 9:23–24). The question is: Do we really believe? If we really do believe God and his Word, then we will be willing to take holy, Jesus-glorifying, countercultural action based on our faith, regardless of cost or consequence. Forward in faith without flinching!
On April 8, 1966, Time magazine featured a stark front cover (for the first time, without a picture of any kind) simply asking the question in bold text, “Is God Dead?” Five years later, on June 21, 1971, the Time cover story featured a picture of a hippie-like Jesus with the caption, “The Jesus Revolution.” Who saw this coming?
Even more interesting, pollsters in the early 1960s predicted that the young generation would be a joy to work with, a generation that really honored authority.17 Not quite! These pollsters had no clue that a massive counterculture revolution was about to rise, a nation-shaking revolution led almost entirely by young people. And these same pollsters never could have imagined that in the midst of this rebellious movement a sweeping religious revival known as the Jesus Revolution would arise as well. Perhaps another great awakening is right around the corner for us—an awakening as near as it is undetected.
We dare not minimize the urgency of the hour in our land. America stands at a critical juncture, and it is possible that in just a few years our religious liberties will be gone, our children will face overwhelming obstacles, and the sun will have set for good (or at least for a generation) over what was once “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” We have no guarantee that this will not happen.
But there is still time for change: the door of opportunity remains open, and this could be our greatest hour. America can be transformed! Our nation can be redeemed! Our sin-sick land can be healed! But we must get desperate if we want to see change come, and we must continue to cry out to God and reach out to people until we see America rocked with the glory of God.
Leonard Ravenhill was a saintly man of prayer who died in 1994. He wrote these words several decades ago:
When a nation calls its prime men to battle, homes are broken, weeping sweethearts say their good-byes, businesses are closed, college careers are wrecked, factories are refitted for wartime production, rationing and discomforts are accepted—all for war. Can we do less for the greatest fight that this world has ever known outside of the cross—this end-time siege on sanity, morality, and spirituality?18
Ravenhill also wrote, “The true man of God is heartsick, grieved at the worldliness of the Church, grieved at the toleration of sin in the Church, grieved at the prayerlessness in the Church. He is disturbed that the corporate prayer of the Church no longer pulls down the strongholds of the devil.” What would he say today, when America has plunged to almost unimaginable depths and the church has become even less vigilant? How urgently should we be living, and how passionately should we be praying?
If we are to see change come to our nation, we must focus on three essential actions.
1. We must give ourselves to focused, fervent, passionate, persistent prayer for revival in the church and for awakening in society.
In the words of A. T. Pierson:
From the day of Pentecost, there has been not one great spiritual awakening in any land which has not begun in a union of prayer, though only among two or three; no such outward, upward movement has continued after such prayer meetings have declined; and it is in exact proportion to the maintenance of such joint and believing supplication and intercession that the word of the Lord in any land or locality has had free course and been glorified.19
This is our great (really, greatest) secret weapon, something every one of us can do, something that exchanges our limited abilities for the limitless power of God. History is filled with the incredible stories of what God has done in answer to faith-filled, persevering prayer. Sadly, many churches have no corporate prayer gatherings, and very little private prayer goes on in the homes of the believers. But the good news is that, to my knowledge, America now has more prayer networks and prayer movements and houses of prayer than at any time in recent history. Many groups are engaging in prayer and worship twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week (some have gone on like this for years now), and there have been gatherings of up to several hundred thousand coming together for a day of prayer and fasting, right here in the United States of America. Will God ignore these prayers?
Evan Roberts, leader of the Welsh Revival from 1904 to 1905, said this: “My mission is first to the churches. When the churches are aroused to their duty, men of the world will be swept into the Kingdom. A whole church on its knees is irresistible.”20 That remains true to this day.
2. We must give ourselves to the Great Commission here in the United States of America, winning the lost and making disciples.
Yes, we must get back to the basics, back to carrying a burden for those who do not know the Lord, back to seeing them as lost and in need of a Savior, back to the joy of sharing our faith, back to looking for opportunities to be witnesses for our Lord. There are no greater ministries than the ministry of prayer and the ministry of evangelism, and these are ministries that every one of us can engage in.
For those of us who once lived worldly, sinful lives before coming to faith, our first weeks and months in the Lord were often the richest in terms of evangelism, since we were still in contact with old friends who saw the undeniable change in our lives, and we were so free in telling them about Jesus. That’s why many of them came to believe as well. But as the years go on, we end up much more focused on our church communities and much more silent about our faith in the public square, so that decades can go by without us leading a single person to the Lord. Is it any wonder, then, that so much stagnation exists in so many of our churches? New souls are the lifeblood of the body of Christ, and without them, we become ingrown and stale.
And all the while, Jehovah’s Witnesses knock on doors day in and day out, sharing their defective faith, and Mormon young people give two years of their lives to the mission field, showing more devotion to Joseph Smith than many of us do to Jesus. And Islam and atheism and a host of others are shouting out their messages while we who have the words of eternal life have grown quiet. This cannot continue.
Evangelist Reinhard Bonnke, who has seen tens of millions of Africans come to faith, once said, “If you want to catch fish, don’t throw your net into the bathtub.” Exactly. We must reach out to the lost, wherever they are. And all of us must have some lost people we know—family, friends, coworkers, neighbors. Why not pray that in the next twelve months, the Lord will allow you to win at least one nonbeliever to the Lord, helping to disciple them and teaching them to go and do the same? If all of us did this, as absolutely tiny as it seems, repeating it every year, the face of America would be radically changed within a decade. And what if we could win numerous souls to the Lord each year? What then?
Oswald J. Smith famously said, “The church that does not evangelize will fossilize.”21 Conversely, the church that does evangelize is revitalized, and those we disciple in turn go and make disciples. This is God’s ultimate way to change the world, the heart essence of the Jesus revolution: changed people go out and change their generation.
All of us are called to be witnesses in one way or another, and we can support those on the front lines of evangelism with our prayers and with our finances while we look for opportunities to share the good news with those we get to meet. And just think: When you are able to lead someone to Jesus, they literally pass from death to life and their eternal destiny is changed. Forever you will share the joy with them. What price can be put on that?
3. We must live out our faith without excuse, without compromise, and without hypocrisy.
One reason that many Americans have turned against the faith in recent years is the hypocrisy they see in the church. They see sex scandals among Catholic priests and evangelical superstars; they see us live just like the world while we get outraged over the immoral ways of the world. Of course they are leaving the church. Why should that surprise us?
But once again, there is a positive side to this: these people expect followers of Jesus to be different, and when we are different—not perfect, but different—they will listen to us. It’s true that there are critics who mock the Bible, the faith, and the Christians, no matter how we live or what we say. But many in the world (including those who were once in the church) expect Christians to live godly lives, expect Christians to help the poor and needy, expect Christians to have solid marriages and families, expect Christian leaders to be people of integrity.
Let us, then, get our own houses in order (which is really the subject of this entire book) by walking in integrity, walking in purity, walking in mercy, walking in truth, walking in justice, walking in faith. Let us recover a spirit of authority with humility and a spirit of boldness with compassion. We have just what America so desperately needs, and as simple as it sounds, the greatest need in America is for the church to be the church.
So let us cast off a defeated, pessimistic, cowardly attitude. There is no place for it, and there is no reason for it. Jesus rose from the dead and ascended to heaven, and all authority in heaven and earth has been given to him (Matt. 28:18). We take up that authority when we use his name, and in his name the Iron Curtain and the Bamboo Curtain have been penetrated and torn in two, while the veil of Islam has been pulled back through the message of the gospel. Is there any power in America that can withstand his name? Jesus has already broken the back of Satan, and it is up to us now to walk in that reality, recognizing that we have authority over his power and that, in Jesus, we are more than conquerors.22
It is true that in many ways America is post-Christian, yet my concern is not so much with a post-Christian society as with an unchristian church. Let us rise up into the fullness of Jesus, into the reality of the Spirit, into the power of the Word, and let us make a positive, life-giving, truly transformative impact on every area of society.
Will God say no to this? Will he turn a deaf ear to the cries of his people? Will he thwart our efforts to win the lost? Will he oppose our efforts to turn to him with all our hearts and our souls? Will he not richly bless us as we kneel before him with tears of repentance, as we stand up and proclaim Jesus to the lost, as we seek to live lives that please him and glorify him? Will he not go before us and stand with us and do the impossible for us—and for the sake of this nation and for the sake of his name?
Let us cast all fear aside, let us look beyond our difficult and sometimes depressing surroundings, and let us say with one voice, “Here we are! Send us! Use us! America must be saved.” What will our Father say in response? I believe he will say to each one of us, “Yes, I am sending you.”
Will you go?