Philippians 3:12
Dear Friends,
The crowds were coming. Sunday school was growing and people were being saved. What more could we want? Of course, God could move that man across the street.
One day Don came out of his study and said, “Honey, I don’t know what’s going on, but God keeps telling me to confess my sins.” Then he said, “I must be a Calvinist now.” For some reason I was spared a panic attack. Whatever a Calvinist was, I knew we weren’t one of them. My mind had flashbacks of our first church when the revival speaker, staying in our home, suddenly said, “I think we should go to the church and confess our sins.” I whirled the kitchen towel over my shoulder and said, “What sin?” I added, “I wouldn’t know what to confess.”
By Sunday Don was wondering how he could best tell his congregation in small doses that he had been captured by the Holy Spirit (and if they felt they would like to be caught, too). He invited them to join him for a special night of prayer. It sounded good to me, and more importantly it sounded safe. I already had my hit-list. I knew who was standing in the need of prayer, and he lived across the street.
From the whole church who wanted to be caught, two responded besides Don and me. One of the two was a retired minister (very retired) who positively had no need. Ruth, the other, a precious saint, caught the sniff of revival and the three of us went right into prayer—not for “them,” but for ourselves.
The Lord let me know right away that I was the one in need, and I never even thought about Bert. Don was at one end of the altar confessing, I was on the other, and Ruth was in the middle. None of us paid any attention to the other, nor did we wonder why we were there. Each one heard in their way. “Thy ears shall hear a word behind them saying this is the way, walk ye in it when you turn to the right hand and when you turn to the left ” (Isaiah 30:21).
Once at home, we shared the awesome awareness of Who was with us, and the revelation of the “woe is me” (Isaiah 6:5) that accompanied the Presence. Both of us agreed we weren’t through confessing. Two years later, the Lord said to me, “That’s enough.” Don was through before me.
This was not a pattern, a formula, or even an experience. It had nothing to do with being saved. David Matthews of the Welsh revival describes it like this: “When God proposes to do a thing for the uplift of humanity, and his church in particular, multitudes of His chosen ones will feel borne along by the birth pangs of a new era.”
At this time we knew nothing of the revival in South Korea and the Congo, the Awakening in Ohio, Paul Bilheimer’s radiobroadcast, nor the Calvary Road book by Roy Hession (which had just been published). We did know that revivals were preceded by confession and this was open season. “Repent and be converted that your sins may be blotted out when the times of refreshing shall come from the Presence of the Lord” (Acts 3:19).
Sin is worse than our narrow conception of “Sex and the City.” (I’ve never seen it.) It’s all the sin combined in our fallen father, Adam, passed on to the human race and ourselves in particular, which becomes our own fallen legacy (Romans 5:12, 15). It took Jesus, the Second Adam and God made man, to come from heaven to cancel the enormous debt (1 Corinthians 15:20-22). Sin came by man, and it took man to buy it back at a horrific price. Jesus put the first fallen Adam out of business (though he’s within calling distance) by taking away all the credentials held against us with His blood on the cross (Colossians 2:13-15).
The first man lost, but the second man won! My debt and your debt is paid in full. Hallelujah!
Love,
Ruth Ann