REVIVAL-OBSTACLES
Is it any wonder the love of tradition
is an enemy to revival? Revival and new life go hand in hand … Let every church
realize that the inordinate love of tradition is a great opponent to revival…
When a church slays the love of tradition, a major obstacle to revival will be
slain with it.
Richard Owen Roberts
Quite simply,
it is a fact of history that the church of Christ has not experienced any major
nationwide revival under the conditions of advanced modernity. On the other hand, modernity undercuts true
dependence on God's sovereign awakening by fostering the notion that we can
effect revival by human means. On the
other hand, modernity makes many people satisfied with privatized,
individualistic, and subjective experiences that are pale counterfeits of true
revival.
Dining with the Devil, Baker, 1993, p.
20.
As long as we
are content to live without revival, we will.
Leonard Ravenhill
The fact is
that a sound and lively truth-basis has been ejected from the premises of
modern evangelicalism. Evangelicalism has been dispossessed of truth to such an
extent that it is becoming frightening. In its place experience and mysticism
are house-sitting the church or, if not these, then church growth pragmatism or
an unhealthy preoccupation with the psychological. But the necessary doctrines
of the holiness of God and His just wrath, justification by faith alone, the
transforming nature of regeneration, the sovereignty of God over all of
creation and in salvation itself, the nature and extent of grace in
justification and in sanctification – doctrines upon which the earlier revivals
thrived – have been considered unimportant and useful only for wizened old theologs holed up in ivory towers who do not relate to the
church’s future.
Jim Elliff
Reformation or Revival? Christian
Communicators Worldwide, www.CCWtoday.org. Used by Permission.
We say we want revival…but on our terms.
Sadly, we pray:
1.
“Come Holy Spirit…but only if You
promise in advance to do things the way we have always done them in our church.”
2.
“Come Holy Spirit…but only if I have some sort of prior
guarantee that when You show up you won’t embarrass
me.”
3.
“Come Holy Spirit…but only if Your
work of revival is one that I can still control, one that preserves intact the
traditions with which I am comfortable.”
4.
“Come Holy Spirit…but only if Your
work of revival is neat and tidy and dignified and understandable and above all
else socially acceptable.”
5.
“Come Holy Spirit…but only if You plan to change others;
only if You make them to be like me; only if You convict their hearts so they
will live and dress and talk like I do.”
6.
“Come Holy Spirit…but only if You
let us preserve our distinctives and retain our differences from others whom we
find offensive.”
Sam Storms
Reflections in Revival, November 8, 2006, www.enjoyinggodministries.com. Used by Permission.
Sometimes we
are inclined to think that a very great portion of modern revivalism has been
more a curse than a blessing, because it has led thousands to a kind of peace
before they have know their misery; restoring the prodigal to the Father’s
house, and never making him say, “Father, I have sinned”
C.H.
Spurgeon