Is There Any Hope For A Spiritual Renewal?

Is there hope for spiritual renewal in America?  A few days ago we looked back to a time when the economic situation was worse than it is today and learned that America successfully weathered that storm.  Is there a time in American history that we can look back to where there was a serious moral decline?  The answer is yes. 

In the time period following the American revolution up to about 1800 America experienced a significant moral and spiritual decline.  Most of the concepts that we would include under the heading of secular humanism arose in France about the time of the American revolution.  When France came to our aid in the Revolutionary War it created a great deal of goodwill toward France and made people very open to French ideas.  The country was soon flooded with atheistic literature and in a very short time a school of American writers rose up and began to support these new ideas.  The most prominent was Thomas Paine, who wrote brilliantly in support of the American revolution before he turned his talents to an anti-Christian crusade.  His book, "Age of Reason" probably sold over a million and a half copies, a simply amazing print run for that day and age.

The "Bible" of secular humanism, the French Encyclopedia, was widely read in America during this period.  Apparently they even had shadowy George Soros type figures financing the decline.  Many of Paine's books and the most damaging French books were either given away or sold at below cost.

While things didn't get as bad as they are now, the decline was serious and it seemed to be gaining momentum.  An observer in Connecticut noted that, "Infidel opinions came in like a flood."  From Kentucky:  "Youth became blasphemers against God.  If a young man of real ability had decided to enter the ministry it would have excited astonishment."  Another observer from Virginia stated that he expected every educated young man he met to either be an agnostic or an atheist.  In about 1795 a student a Yale estimated that there was one believing Christian in each of the freshman  and junior classes, about ten in the senior class, and not one believer in the sophomore class. 

More and more people decided to live together without getting married.  The occupant of the White House, Thomas Jefferson, did not believe in the inspiration of the Bible.  He was a big fan of the French revolution and French ideas.  Jefferson's secretary of war, Henry Dearborn, had this to say about Christian churches.  "So long as these temples stand we cannot hope for good government."

The forces of darkness were very confident.  Paine said, "I have gone through the Bible as a man would go through a wood with and ax and felled trees.  Here they lie and the priests may replant them, but they will never grow."  The French philosopher Voltaire claimed that by the early 1800's the bible would have passed "into the limbo of forgotten literature."

So what happened?  There were still a lot of people alive who remembered the great outpouring of the Spirit of God that took place in the 1740's.  They began to pray.  And starting in 1799, God began to answer.  For the next 35+ years, there was always at least one community somewhere in the United States that was experiencing a revival; an unusual outpouring of the Spirit of God.  Hundreds of thousands of people became converted.  The entire moral landscape of America was transformed.

Pray for revival.  The situation is NOT hopeless.  Pray for revival until revival comes or until the day you die.  And when you get to heaven, if revival hasn't come yet, keep praying.  There is still hope for America, just as there is hope for all the other nations of this world.  Prayer is the key. 

"Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up."  (Luke 18:1 NIV) 

Is There Any Hope for the Economy?

"Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up."  (Luke 18:1 NIV)  "I urge, then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people— for kings and all those in authority."  (I Tim. 2:1, 2 NIV)

The United States of America is trillions and trillions of dollars in debt.  Meanwhile nations like Greece and Italy are dealing with unsustainable debt and will probably cause the collapse of the Euro.  Many observers believe that what is happening in Greece and Italy right now is a picture of America's not so distant future.  And if the American financial system totters and falls we will probably take the rest of the planet with us.  It all seems so hopeless.  Is there a way out?

Absolutely!  They key to our survival is the Christian church.  Prayer is our only hope.  Less watching the news and more praying about the news is the key.

Perhaps a little history lesson will help us to understand what is at stake.  By the end of the American revolution the economic situation was much, much worse than it is today.  The government was massively, hopelessly in debt.  They had printed way, way too much money and inflation was raging totally out of control.  Washington despaired of being able to provide for his troops.  It took a wagon load of money to purchase a wagon load of supplies.

And don't be tempted to think that people were wiser, holier, and more prudent then than we are now.  The states weren't willing to pay the federal government what they had promised to pay and the federal government didn't have any way to make them pay up.  What this means is that the people of that time wanted something (national defense) that they weren't willing to pay for.  Does that sound familiar?


As a result Washington's army was months and months behind in paying the troops.  Their diet was inadequate and they frequently went dressed in rags and without shoes.  The troops were in danger of being discharged at the end of the war without any money to pay the expenses of their trip home.  Some of Washington's officers were working on a secret plan to march the army to the capitol to demand justice.  Only the presence of George Washington and the love that his army had for him saved the revolution from turning into some kind of military dictatorship.  The wise men of Europe expected our whole democratic experiment to collapse.  If Las Vegas had existed then all of the smart money would have been betting against the future of the United States.

After a few years of independence enough people realized that the government simply wasn't going to work.  So after a great deal of debate we ended up with a new constitution and a new political leader, our first president, George Washington.  And George Washington and Alexander Hamilton put together a plan that brought us out of national bankruptcy and on to a sound economic footing.  I won't bore you with the details, but I want to emphasize the main point.  The economic situation was worse then than it is now and wise men found a way out.

Let me share a prayer burden with you.  We all need to pray that God would give the people in power the same kind of wisdom He gave to Old Testament leaders like Daniel and Joseph.  We need to stop looking horizontally at the (seemingly) hopeless situation and start looking vertically up to the heavenly solution.  There is hope and that hope is prayer offered to God the Father in the name of Jesus Christ.

Why We Can't Get Along

"When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, the results are very clear: sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and other sins like these. "  Galatians 5:19-20

This is the definite Bible list of what's wrong with human nature.  This is what sin has done to us.  A lot of what is on the list is about what you would expect:  sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, idolatry, sorcery, drunkenness, and wild parties.  That sounds like what you would expect from a Biblical description of sin.  But let's look at the other half of the list:  hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, and envy.

A few years ago a man in California plaintively asked a now famous question:  "Why can't we just get along?"  And this is the reason why.  Sin, by it's very nature, is divisive and quarrelsome.  This is human nature 101.  What can we learn from this?

We can be more understanding of the political process.  Go back two paragraphs and look at that list again the next time you see the battling talking heads on the TV.  There never has been and never will be a time in which the people in politics put the good of the majority above all other values.  There are exceptions, but they simply prove the rule.  If you want leaders who will be noble and enlightened you'll have to wait for the millennium.

We can be a little more thoughtful about the way we do church.  If you are the devil, and you understand that all this stuff is in human nature, you are going to constantly attack local churches by trying to get a small group of people together to get rid of the pastor.  When we get into church disputes are we really being motivated by principles or is a weakness in our nature being manipulated by evil spirits?

We can be really careful in our relationships at work and at home.  If you reread that list you might wonder if anybody could ever stay married to anyone else for a lifetime.  And you should certainly have a clearer understanding of why there is so much gossip and office politics at work.

How should we respond?  We should love everybody and forgive everybody.  We should be "the very soul of kindness."  And we should always keep a careful watch on ourselves.  There is a lot of junk inside of me.  I have to hold tight to Jesus if I am going to walk in love and be willing to forgive those who sin against me.

Blind Captivity

"The Lord’s bond-servant must not be quarrelsome, but be kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged, with gentleness correcting those who are in opposition, if perhaps God may grant them repentance leading to the knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, having been held captive by him to do his will."  2 Timothy 2:24-26

I've been praying this passage as a prayer for a Christian woman who has abandoned and divorced her husband.  And every time I pray it seems backwards.  I would expect a knowledge of the truth to lead to repentance.  Wouldn't you?  The devil has you confused ("held captive by him to do his will").  So the Holy Spirit begins to reason with you.  He helps you to understand what you are doing is wrong and why it is wrong.  And because of this you repent.

That's not what the passage says.  The passage says that the repentance is a gift from God and the knowledge comes after the repentance.  You don't repent because you came to your senses, you come to your sense after you repent!  Does this mean that the devil can build some kind of a stronghold in my life (a "snare" that holds me "captive to do his will") that is so strong that I can't think my way out of it?  Does he bring us into a state of pure moral blindness where we simply can not see the truth any longer (at least as it applies to the sin that binds us)?


So all of a sudden, while praying for this woman, I find myself asking if I shouldn't begin to pray this for me!  In what areas of my life am I so blind, so completely given over to Satan's control, that I can't even begin to see things from a godly perspective until God Himself rescues me by giving me the gift of repentance?  Where am I acting so irrationally that I literally need God's help so that I can come to my senses?


Let us pray.

A Penny for Your Thoughts

So imagine yourself holding up a penny at arm's length.  Then visualize how small one of Lincoln's eyes would be with the penny held out at the end of your arm.  The director of the Hubble telescope aimed his telescope at a piece of the night sky just about that size and kept it aimed at that tiny point for ten days.  They picked a piece of the sky by the Big Dipper, a boring part of the sky that didn't have any bright stars or any galaxies that they knew of.  And this is what they found in that little piece of the sky the size of Lincoln's eye on a penny held out at arm's length.

They found thousands of galaxies that they had never seen before.  And each galaxy had 100's of billions of stars.  Intrigued by their amazing discovery, they wondered if they had happened to aim the telescope at a part of the sky that was unusually crowded.  So they repeated the experiment with a part of the southern sky and they found the exact same thing.  As a result of this research they now believe that are 50 billion galaxies, each one with hundreds of billions of stars.

Not only that, in the middle of next week we have to move my dad into a different nursing home.  His Medicare funding has run out so he has to find a new place.  He has a free ride with the VA, but the closest VA nursing home is in Freeport, IL.  None of us live in Freeport, IL.  I'm the closest and it's a little more than two hours away.  The good news is that a dear friend of mine runs a nursing home 1.2 miles from my house and is going to see if she can get a contract with the VA.  But that could take months.  In the meantime I have to leave my dad with strangers and that just seems wrong.  Hopefully they will be the same kind of people who work at my group home, people who really care about their residents and who will treat him with love and respect.

What is the connection between outer space and my dad?  It's found in Romans 8:18.  "For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us."  This verse teaches us that being a Christian does not give us an exemption when it comes to suffering.  I don't know that the new home will cause my dad to suffer all that much.  Dad has no memory of your visit after you leave.  He's very happy to see you while you're there, but he doesn't remember it.  So he won't be suffering because I can't get up to see him every day.  Also, dad has always been a very stoic kind of a guy.  He became very accepting of the nursing home he has been living in a remarkably short time.  I think he'll probably adapt to the new place just as quickly.  But he won't be home and he won't be with family.  He could come to live with us but he requires 24 hour supervision and none of us can afford to quit our jobs.  And we don't have the money to make the house accessible.

So what do I do with all of this, other than just learn to accept what I can't change?  I can do what Christians always must do, what God Himself bids us to do.  Like the Hubble telescope I can look up and beyond.  It can look at the big picture.  And the big picture is that my God made 50 billion galaxies, each one containing 100's of billions of stars, without breaking a sweat.  And all of the incomprehensible vastness of space is not big enough to contain my God.  He is bigger than space.  And this infinite being has big plans for my dad.

These plans are so glorious that all of the suffering that you can experience in a really horrible human life is nothing compared to how wonderful it is going to be in the life to come.  The beautiful, perfect mind that created all his is going to spend "the ages to come" expressing the "surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us."  (Ephesians 2:7)  The infinite, perfect mind of God will spend the rest of forever finding ways to be kind to us.

There is a greatness about the souls in heaven.  On earth we might call it "gravitas."  There is a nobility.  You may be an airhead in this life, but you won't remain an airhead in heaven.  Those souls have been fully enlightened and they are creatures of great wisdom.  They are also creatures of great and profound joy.  They live in an ongoing celestial high where the drug of choice is the love of God which gives you an everlasting high that never stresses or strains you in any way.  My mom has already experienced this transformation, and the odds are that my father will experience it before I will.  But the day will come when we will all be together again.  And we will see more clearly than we can right now that in the grand, cosmic scheme of things that it was not possible for God to create a universe with free will beings who could avoid all suffering.

If you could somehow come to us in that place and ask us, "Was it worth it?  Were the trials and pains of your earthly pilgrimage a price too high to pay to come to this place and to be as you are right now?"  This is what our answer would most surely be.  "'The sufferings' are 'not worthy to be compared with the glory' in which we now exist."

25 “For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? 27 And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life? 28 And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, 29 yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. 30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith! 31 Do not worry then, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear for clothing?’ 32 For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33 But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. 34 So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” (Matthew 6 NASB)

This passage teaches us not to worry about our finances. Jesus refers to those who worry as those of “little faith.” Faith is the cure for worry. Small faith results in great anxiety. A large faith is the key to inner peace which is much more valuable than great wealth. Note that Jesus wants those with small faith to grow and increase in their faith.

Faith can be strengthened through meditating on a line of reasoning or teaching. Jesus seeks to increase their faith by making simple arguments that anyone can understand. By meditating on these arguments and repeating them over and over again you can grow in faith. These are some of the things that you can and should be saying to yourself.

“God feeds the birds of the air even though they don’t plan ahead and work to guarantee their food supply. God will provide me with food because I am much more important than the birds. God is willing to clothe the flowers, even though they only live for a very short period of time. God is willing to clothe me. I am more valuable than a flower.”

“Worry doesn’t do any good. I can’t add one single hour to my life by worrying. On the other hand, I can waste many hours of my life by worrying. If I put God’s kingdom first in my life God will provide for my basic necessities.”

Teachers in the “faith movement” place a strong emphasis on confessing your faith. They say that you can go from a weak faith to a strong faith by confessing a promise of God over and over again, preferably out loud. On the basis of Matthew six I think we would have to say that the faith teachers are right on this one. Jesus is giving us arguments that we can repeat to ourselves over and over again so that we can grow in faith and inner peace.

We should note that there is no promise here that God will give me luxuries. There are other passages that would seem to indicate that God will help us financially to do better than the simple necessities of life, but first we must have our hearts right before God. Paul echoes what Jesus is saying in Matthew six when he exhorts us in I Timothy 6:8, “But if we have food and clothing, with these we will be content.”

We live in times of tremendous financial uncertainty. There are those who fear that we may actually slip from a recession into a worldwide depression. It would be a very good thing for every Christian to confront this fear with bold and biblical thinking.

What would happen if I were to lose my job and be unable to find another? What would happen if I were to lose my cell phone, my cable TV, and my internet access? What would happen if my computer and my X-Box were to break (as they inevitably will) and I would be unable to replace them? What if I could no longer afford a car and had to rely on my bicycle, walking, and public transportation? What would I do? How would I survive?

I would be just fine. I would put God first and trust Him to help me with the real necessities of life. The sun would continue to rise and set. And my personal happiness would continue to be in direct proportion to the amount of time I spend seeking God. With more stuff or less stuff, my personal happiness seems to be dependent on the whole God inside thing and how much time and attention I give to Him.

I can’t close without making one final point. Those who want to say that man is just a part of nature and that a man is not intrinsically more valuable than an animal are in direct disagreement with Jesus Christ. He says I am more important that a bird or a flower. I am a created being made in the image of God. I have a right to be here. I have a right to thankfully (and responsibly) use the resources of this planet. If someone wants to argue that point (and in these days, many do) don’t argue with me; argue with Him.

It's just a bump in the road

So here's the deal.  My dad just went into a nursing home.  He's 89.  And I guess the smart money would say that he probably won't be able to rehab to the point where he can go back home to live with my stepmother.  So how do you deal with that?  How should I feel about that?

This is my coping mechanism.  I'm planning to go on a wilderness canoe trip.  With my dad.

We used to do that every year when I was growing up and in my early adult years.  My dad was a very strong guy.  After I got married Nancy went on two of these trips with us.  On the first trip, while Nancy was carrying a pack in this swampy area, she suddenly found one of her legs sinking into the mud too deeply to get out.  I mean she was absolutely stuck.  Going nowhere.  And wondering how she was going to get herself out of this.  And here comes my dad, probably in his early sixties at this point, coming down the trail behind her.  He has his own pack on.  And without breaking stride he grabs the corner of her pack with one hand and all of a sudden Nancy and her leg are being levitated out of the mud.

Not only is my dad strong, he is a great fisherman.  One year I decided to mimic him the whole trip.  When he fished, I would fish.  I would try and throw my lures in the same general area where he threw his.  I would use the exact same bait he used.  By the end of the week he was more than 20 fish ahead of me.  I have no idea how he did that.  On the second trip we took together he asked to be let out of the canoe so he could go up this creek that was emptying into the lake we were on.   I thought the creek was way too shallow to have anything interesting in it, but about a half hour later he comes out with three big bass on a stringer.

So how do you take a man who is confined to a nursing home on a canoe trip?  Obviously you don't.  I'll have to wait until after he's dead.  And then I'll have to wait a little longer until after I'm dead.  And then I'll have to wait until the resurrection.  And then we'll go on the canoe trip.  Accompanying us will be my younger brother who used to take these trips with us.  He has a bad case of MS and, barring a miracle of divine healing, won't be taking any more canoe trips in this life.  (I neither predict nor rule out such a miracle.)

The lakes will probably still be there, but we'll need a new map and we'll have to start from scratch in terms of learning exactly where the best fishing holes will be.  I would expect the topography to be radically transformed.  There is this major event that will happen (in my theological opinion) immediately after the resurrection of the Christian dead (the rapture) but before we (the resurrected Christians) actually return to this planet.  "And the stars of the sky fell to the earth … and every mountain and island were moved out of their places."  (Revelation 6:13, 14)  This may be the most terrifying physical event in human history and I would expect it to dramatically rearrange those wilderness lakes.

Nancy and I just got back from our 24th Rocky Mountain Honeymoon.  We've been on 25 trips to the Rockies, but one of those trips involved other people, so it doesn't count as a honeymoon (hi Scott & Linda!).  To count as a honeymoon trip is has to be just the two of us.  When I was a younger man I put together a string of about 25 wilderness canoe trips.

So how many trips can we expect to take after we're dead and brought back to life?  Well, the Bible speaks of Christ returning to the earth and ruling the planet for 1,000 years.  If that is a literal 1,000 years I would hope to put together a string of about 1,000 mountain trips and 1,000 canoe trips (I'll be taking at least two trips a year!).

Can I tell you a little secret about our just completed mountain trip?  We took it easier than we used to.  For the first time, instead of disappearing into a wilderness area carrying everything we need on our back for a week we took two small trips of three nights each.  That means we only had to carry half the food at one time.  And instead of driving home non-stop (one drives while the other sleeps) we drove part way and spent the night in a nice motel, almost the kind of thing you would expect normal people to do on their vacations.

We're getting older.  The day may come when we won't be able to do anything but car camp.  And then the day may come when we won't even be able to do that (I'll pitch a tent in the back yard of the nursing home!).  And when that day comes it will be time to start planning the next 1,000 trips.

Here is an amazing statement, one you should spend a lot of time meditating on.  "I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us."  (Romans 8:18)  The man who wrote that statement had been whipped so many times that he couldn't have had one square inch of skin on his back that wasn't pure scar tissue.  Over the course of his ministry he had received 195 lashes on his back as a punishment for preaching the gospel.  Every single one of those strokes would have broken the skin (this was over the course of five different whippings).  He was also beaten with rods three times (I don't know how many strokes) and stoned once.  He survived three shipwrecks, and in one of those he spent 24 hours clinging to a wooden plank in the middle of the ocean.  In addition to this he experienced "many sleepless nights, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure."  (See 2 Corinthians 11) 

And after enduring all that he said that there was something waiting for him after he died that would make all of the suffering seem like it was nothing.  It would be like someone offering you a brand new Porsche for $25.00.  The sufferings of this life are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us.

So my dad's body has finally failed him and he's in a nursing home.  But that's not the end of anything that really matters.  It's just a bump in the road.  Join me as I write (in advance) one of the trip notes from a trip that won't even happen until after the resurrection. 

"Our first evening in the wilderness.  We had a rugged day of travel to get to this lake, and we've found a decent campsite on a small island.  The topography is all different and we are going to have to find campsites and fishing holes from scratch the way we always have when we travel into a new wilderness area.  While Dad and my brother Wayne and our two sons set up the tents I cooked supper over a wood fire.  Then we headed back out in our canoes with our fishing poles."

"As usual, Dad just knows where the fish are.  You would think that I should be able to figure this out by now but I still don't have a clue.  There is something so beautiful about the way the fishing line undulates out off the end of the rod as the bait goes flying across the water.  As we fished we were serenaded by the eerie cries of a loon at the other end of the lake.  We brought back five Walleye for breakfast.  Day one.  Trip one.  999 trips to go.  Thanks be to God."