In the spring of 1974, when I was still an unbeliever, some friends took me to an Assembly of God Church called the Christian Life Center. At that point in my life I knew nothing of the Gospel message, and I can’t say I even had any confidence in God’s existence. But when I walked into that church I knew with a certainty I couldn’t explain that God was there. The worship service hadn’t started; no one was doing anything to manipulate my emotions, but I walked in as an unbeliever and immediately knew that God existed and that He was present in that place. This is the thing Moses is concerned about in verse 16: “How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?” This is the thing that sets God’s people apart from all others: that God is among us.
We see this in the New Testament. For example, Ephesians 3:16: “I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge -- that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” When we become Christians, it’s not just that we change our minds about the truth or that we change our behavior. We are brought into fellowship with God; God dwells among us. “For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves...” (Col. 1:13). Jesus promised to be present when two or three are gathered in His name. John says, in his first letter, that we have fellowship with both the Father and the Son.
And yet, when we look at the Church, this is not always clear. There are times when the Church seems overwhelmed by the spirit of the world. The Church is never perfect, and yet there are times when the Church is so far from the New Testament standard that we would be embarrassed to claim that God is among us. At such times, people are likely to say “you can’t be serious,” and we’d have nothing to say in reply. There are times when the light of the Spirit in the Church seems almost to have gone out. But then something happens. God pours out His Spirit; He begins to demonstrate, in unmistakable ways, that His people belong to Him and that He is among them. People may continue to mock, but their mockery is of a different sort, and many of those who come to mock have the experience I had of being arrested by the certainty of God’s presence. Something like this happened in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1735, under the ministry of Jonathan Edwards. It began in the church, but then began to impact the whole town. He says, reporting on it later: “This work of God, as it was carried on, and the number of true saints multiplied, soon made a glorious alteration in the town; so that in the spring and summer following, anno 1735, the town seemed to be full of the presence of God: it never was so full of love, nor of joy, and yet so full of distress, as it was then. There were remarkable tokens of God’s presence in almost every house. It was a time of joy in families on account of salvation being brought unto them; parents rejoicing over their children as new born, and husbands over their wives, and wives over their husbands. The goings of God were then seen in his sanctuary, God’s day was a delight, and his tabernacles were amiable. Our public assemblies were then beautiful: the congregation was alive in God’s service, every one earnestly intent on the public worship, every hearer eager to drink in the words of the minister as they came from his mouth; the assembly in general were, from time to time, in tears while the word was preached; some weeping with sorrow; and distress, others with joy and love, others with pity and concern for the souls of their neighbours” (Works, vol. 1, p. 348). A town full of the presence of God; remarkable tokens of grace in each house.
This is the sort of thing we are praying for when we pray for revival in the Church. Revival is more than a series of evangelistic meetings. Revival is what happens when God, through the sovereign power of His Spirit, breathes new life into the Church. It’s something that lies outside of our own control; we can’t plan for revival. But we can humble ourselves and cry out to God for a fresh visitation from His Spirit. We can’t make it happen. But we can recognize our need and cry out to God, asking Him to breathe new life into the Church.
This is what Moses and the Israelites are doing in Exodus 33. First of all, notice the spiritual condition of the people at this point. Things had seemed to be going well. The nation had been miraculously delivered from Egypt, and Pharaoh and his army had been destroyed. There had been problems: the Israelites had repeatedly grumbled against Moses’ leadership, but they had recently defeated the Amalekites and were on their way to the land of promise. There had been setbacks and disobedience, but now things seemed to be on the right track. But then Moses had gone up into the mountain to receive the law and had been gone for over a month. As the days passed and Moses still didn’t appear, the people asked Aaron, Moses’ brother, to make them an idol. They said “Come, make us gods who will go before us” (32:1). Aaron asked for their gold earrings, and when they gave them to him he made them into a calf, and the Israelites cried out: “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt” (32:4). Aaron then built an altar in front of the calf, and the people proceeded to worship it. At that point, Moses returned. (It’s interesting to notice how often we give in just before a trial or temptation is over.) The people had come under God’s judgment and several thousand of them had died. But that wasn’t the end of it. God now says: “Go up to the land flowing with milk and honey. But I will not go with you, because you are a stiff-necked people and I might destroy you on the way” (33:3). God is still sending them into the promised land, and He is sending an angel with them, but He is not going to manifest His presence among them. He is going to give them outward success, but He is not going to be with them.
We need to remind ourselves here that outward success is not necessarily an indication that God is pleased with us. God is telling them to go in and possess the land, and that He will send an angel to help them do it. Outwardly, everything is going to look the same. To an outside observer, it will look like they are functioning as God intended. But something is lacking. One of the subtle dangers churches face is that of assuming that God is blessing because the programs are running well. If you raise a concern about the spiritual health of the church, they’ll respond: “But look at how we’re growing! People are being blessed by our programs. What more do you expect?” These words in Exodus make it clear that it is possible to be successfully doing the things a church is supposed to do, and yet to be in a state of serious spiritual decline. We can be accomplishing great things, but there’s a sense that something is lacking. People walking in may be impressed with our facility or our programs, but they’re not arrested by the reality of God’s presence.
It’s not just that we can produce counterfeits, and so end up with something less than the real thing. We can market the church in ways that make numerical growth more likely, and we can order our programs so that people will feel good about being here. But what is being offered to Israel here is not a counterfeit. What they are being offered here is the real thing, without the full blessing of God’s presence among them. God is sending an angel to miraculously intervene for them, to fulfill His promises. They are going to experience God’s blessing in an outward sense, even though God has withdrawn from them.
But look how the people respond in vv. 4-11. “When the people heard these distressing words, they began to mourn and no one put on any ornaments” (v. 4). They are described as a stiff-necked people, and yet when they hear that God is withdrawing His presence from them, they mourn. When God is going to do a work in reviving His people, He invariably leads them into a deeper conviction of sin, which leads them to mourn, to feel grieved over their sins. We see this pattern in the beatitudes. Jesus begins with “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” and this is immediately followed by “blessed are those who mourn.” When we see our spiritual poverty, when we see that we are weak, poor, blind and naked before God, and that we can only come to Him with empty hands and cry out to Him for mercy, we naturally are grieved. God’s first work in leading us to revival is not to make us feel good, but to convict us of how far we’ve fallen. God’s first concern is not to make us happy, but to make us holy, and He begins by showing us how unholy we are. And this is a painful experience.
A deep mourning over sin has characterized revivals both in Scripture and in the history of the Church. This is why I had such strong reservations about the revival movement associated several years ago with the Toronto Vineyard. During the first anniversary celebration of the “Toronto Blessing,” a pastor asked Randy Clark, one of the leaders in this movement, why this revival hadn’t placed a strong emphasis on the holiness of God and human sinfulness. Clark’s response was that, in this revival “God decided to throw a party for his people because they ‘already feel so icky about themselves’” (Christian Research Journal, Sept.-Oct. 97, p. 45). Another leader in the movement shares this incident: “‘One night I was preaching on hell’... when suddenly laughter ‘just hit the whole place. The more I told people what hell was like, the more they laughed’” (Ibid., p. 16). It’s not just that I am doubtful about the doctrine of hell being an occasion for hilarity. It’s that this movement seemed to be bypassing something that is necessary to true revival. God is holy, and when He makes Himself known among us, one of the first things we will feel is a renewed sense of our own unholiness.
Look at what happened to Isaiah, for example. “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted....” God is surrounded by seraphs, crying “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.” And when Isaiah sees all this, he cries out: “Woe to me! ... ‘I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty’” (6:1-5). In our longing for revival, let’s not get sidetracked. God’s desire is to make us holy, and the path to holiness begins with a deep recognition of our own sinfulness.
The Israelites mourned, but they didn’t stop there. Verses 7-11 describe the tent where Moses would meet with God. This isn’t the tabernacle, for that hadn’t yet been built. The NIV translates verse 7: “Now Moses used to take a tent and pitch it outside the camp some distance away, calling it the ‘tent of meeting.’ Anyone inquiring of the Lord would go to the tent of meeting outside the camp.” This word translated “inquire” is most often translated “seek.” Most of the other translations I consulted, including the NASB, the AV and the RSV handle it in this way. The NASB, for example, says this: “And it came about, that everyone who sought the Lord would go out to the tent of meeting which was outside the camp.” It’s true that many who went out to the tent of meeting were seeking advice, were inquiring about God’s direction in some particular area--I think that’s why the NIV translates it in this way. But I think the other translations make better sense in this context. The people were not only inquiring of the Lord, they were seeking Him. They were mourning over their sins, and they began going out to the tent of meeting to seek the Lord.
They’ve sinned presumptuously, and now the Lord has withdrawn His presence from them. They’re mourning over this, but they’re not just wallowing in sorrow. It’s possible to mourn in a way that does no good at all, to say, in effect, “I really wish things had gone better in my spiritual life, but now I’ve really missed the boat. It’s a shame that things didn’t go differently.” The Israelites are distressed with their spiritual condition, and they respond by going out to the tent of meeting to seek the Lord, and by standing beside their own tents and worshiping the Lord as He reveals Himself to Moses. This, by the way, is a good way to tell the difference between the conviction of the Holy Spirit and the condemnation of the accuser. When Satan is accusing us, it always tends to cripple us spiritually and makes us feel that we simply cannot enter God’s presence. When the Holy Spirit is convicting us of sin, we feel unworthy, yes, but He also makes us aware of the reality of God’s grace. When the Holy Spirit convicts us of sin, He leads us into God’s presence; His conviction always carries an invitation with it. When Satan is condemning us for our sins, he tries to drive us away from God. The Israelites were guilty and they knew it, but this didn’t drive them away from God; it drove them to seek Him all the more.
Notice also, in verses 12-23, what Moses is praying for. He’s dissatisfied with anything less than the presence of God among them. Throughout this passage we see him hungering and reaching for more of God, both for himself and for the people. In verse 13, he says: “If you are pleased with me, teach me your ways so I may know you and continue to find favor with you. Remember that this nation is your people.” Verse 15: “If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here.” And verse 18: “Now show me your glory.” No matter how much of God he has, Moses wants more.
Paul was like this. He had learned to be content with his outward situation, as he says in Philippians 4:12: “I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.” But he is just the opposite in his spiritual life. Listen to what he says earlier in the same letter, in Philippians 3:12-14: “Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”
In my early Christian life I floundered for the first couple of years because I didn’t know what to do to grow spiritually. A real turning point for me was the discovery that I could be mentored by reading Christian books. One of the first mentors I found in this way was A.W. Tozer. Tozer was a Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor for many years, and his life was marked by an exceptional hunger for God. I’ve been told that a person walking into his office unannounced was likely to find him prostrate on the floor in worship. I was dissatisfied with my spiritual life, and I wanted to catch something of the spirit that I could sense in Tozer’s books. Here’s one of the things he said: “Contentment with earthly goods is the mark of a saint; contentment with our spiritual state is a mark of inward blindness. One of the greatest foes of the Christian is religious complacency.... For every Christian will become at last what his desires have made him. We are all the sum total of our hungers. The great saints have all had thirsting hearts.... Their longing after God all but consumed them; it propelled them onward and upward to heights toward which less ardent Christians look with languid eye and entertain no hope of reaching” (The Root of the Righteous, p. 55). Moses hungered after God in this way. Like Paul, he had an all-consuming desire to know God. If we want to see revival in our midst, we need to cry out to God for a hunger that will be satisfied with nothing less than God Himself. Moses could have settled for something less. I suspect the thing that most often keeps us from experiencing revival is that we are willing to settle for less. God offered Moses success, but that wasn’t enough for him. He wanted God.
Notice how God responds to all this. He promises repeatedly to go with them, He gives Moses a greater experience of Himself than he had ever had, and He renews His covenant with the people, which prepares the way for the building of the tabernacle. It’s true that we can’t produce revival. We can’t manipulate God or twist His arm, but we can do those things which God has shown himself willing to bless, those things which have repeatedly led to revival. God was pleased when Moses prayed “show me your glory.” He didn’t give him exactly what he asked for. Moses couldn’t have handled that. But when we humble ourselves before God and cry out to Him, when we long for Him to make Himself known among us, He will respond, although He will do so in His own way and time. It’s a good sign when God’s people begin to stir themselves up to pray in earnest for revival. The commentator Matthew Henry, commenting on this passage, said “When God designs mercy, he stirs up prayer” (Vol. 1, p. 419).
So we see here something of how to pray for revival. The most important thing is a sense of longing for God Himself. The thing that sets us apart from all other groups, the real distinguishing mark of the Church, is that God is among us. If He is stirring you with a renewed hunger to know Him, this can be a prelude to a greater outpouring of His Spirit both in your own life and in the life of the church. If He’s drawing you to Himself, it’s because He wants to make Himself known to you.
We have a spiritual enemy, who is not content with the trouble he’s caused among us in the past. His real goal is to destroy the witness of the Church completely. The church I mentioned earlier, the Christian Life Center, doesn’t exist anymore. They got in over their heads in a building program and things just started unraveling. The beautiful facility they built is now an office complex. I was already gone when this happened, so I don’t know all of the details. But I do know this: God was doing a work there, but that didn’t make them immune to the attacks of Satan. Let’s not be presumptuous. God is at work among us, but we are still very much in need of a fresh outpouring of God’s Spirit. We see the early Church, a very short time after Pentecost, in Acts chapter 4, crying out to God for help and receiving a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit. God had already done a great work among them, but they still cried out to Him in need.
We need also to remember that we are part of a larger body, and that things are not going well in many parts of the Church throughout the world. There are glimmerings of hope here and there; there are encouraging signs that God may be leading the Church toward revival, but it is not accomplished yet and there is much out there that is discouraging. I mentioned finding A.W. Tozer as a spiritual mentor early in my Christian life. Another mentor I found a few years later was the great Welsh preacher, Martyn Lloyd-Jones. A half century ago, he preached a series of sermons on revival, and he said this about the spiritual condition of the Church at that time: “When you contrast the condition of the Church today with what she has been, you cannot but come to the conclusion that for various reasons God is not looking upon us and smiling upon us. There is a sense in which we are desolate. Speaking generally the Church today, throughout the whole world, is an abandoned Church. She is in a desolate condition, and I maintain that that is the thing that we must realize” (Revival, p. 256). I believe this is still true for much of the Church in America today.
The test is not whether or not we are experiencing outward success. Our programs may be running very well. We live in a society that is obsessed with technique. Much good has come out of this desire to find efficient ways of doing things, but there has also been a tendency to become so efficient that we think we can do things on our own. Os Guinness said: “No civilization in history has offered more gifts and therefore has amplified the temptation of living ‘by bread alone’ with such power and variety and to such effect. In today’s convenient, climate-controlled spiritual world created by the managerial and therapeutic revolutions, nothing is easier than living apart from God. Idols are simply the ultimate techniques of human causation and control--without God. God’s sovereign freedom has met its match in ours. We have invented the technology to put God’s Word on hold” (Dining With The Devil, pp. 37-38).
The test is not whether we’re successful, or whether people are impressed with our programs. The test is whether God is among us. When people walk into our churches, are they immediately arrested by the reality of God’s presence? If we find ourselves wanting to stay where we are, feeling satisfied that things are going well enough, that is a very bad sign. Moses had experienced so much of God, and yet he still cried out for more. God is present among us, but we need more of Him. Let’s cry out to Him for a fresh outpouring of His Spirit in our midst. Let’s cry out for “remarkable tokens of His presence,” and continue crying out, knowing that He is able to do more than we can ask or imagine.
No comments:
Post a Comment