REVIVAL IS HERE - BUT DIFFERENT

Picking up the threads where I left them

               I am returning to this blog after a 2 year break. Just read through my last entry and realized once again how much I have changed. In the course of these two years I have undergone a profound change in my perception and my thinking, which led to dramatic changes in my life, my family, my work. I can truthfully say that scales have been removed from my spiritual eyes. The truth does indeed set us free. Life feels totally different now. Victory has superseded defeat. Joy, love and peace are no longer rare phenomena in a life mainly characterized by struggle, ups and downs and loads of guilt and condemnation. They are permanent now, it's awesome. I think it is fair to say: I have been revived. Revival is here. It is spreading in Ireland and the whole world. Excitement is bubbling up within me even as I am writing these words. But it is completely different from how I expected it to be. And it is different to all the stories I read about past revivals. Two years ago, God told me it would be different. I didn't understand it then, but I am slowly beginning to see it now. Let me explain.

Forget about the past
              Two years ago, in the fall of 2012, we conducted a week long evangelistic outreach with the evangelist Tony Stone here in Greystones. Tony is a friend and coworker of Reinhard Bonnke and a great evangelist, so I really hoped to experience some kind of a breakthrough in the church with him. The week went well, we saw a few people born again. The highlight for me was the conversion of my youngest son David during one of the meetings. But no huge breakthrough occurred. It was after that week that during my devotional bible reading God spoke to me through the words of the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah 43:18-19 "Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland."

A new approach
               In my preoccupation with revival and the things that happened in the past I have come to expect God to do a similar thing in our time. But obviously God was up to something else. With this scripture he redirected my attention. I have been expecting something to happen on the outside - some kind of movement, outpouring of the Spirit, churches uniting in prayer for revival... Instead, things began to happen inside of me. I've come to realize that the major hindrance to revival was not a lack of prayer on our part, not a lack of repentance, nor a lack of willingness on God's part to pour out his Spirit. The main hindrance is wrong thinking, wrong paradigms in our world view that make us blind to the truth of God's word. That came first as a shock, but then started to really liberate me. Without knowing it, I had been operating from a wrong "mental map" over the past 20 years of my ministry. Could that be possible? An evangelical pastor, with a real heart for God, with the bible in my hands and a fervor to serve God, could I be so wrong and not see the truth for all these years? - Well, that's exactly what had happened to me.

A change in my thinking
               Our thinking is a very powerful thing, paradigms of thinking have enormous consequences for our lives. They determine whether we connect to truth or are lost in deception and error. Because I had studied evangelical theology at a renowned seminary and read the bible for myself, I've come to think that I knew the truth. But my life didn't reflect that. There was not much joy and excitement left, I very rarely experienced the power of God that I read about in the bible, and most of the time I felt inadequate, guilty and like a failure. The gospel that I knew and believed somehow didn't deliver on the promises it made. It didn't really feel like good news in my experience most of the time. God was about to open my eyes to why this was so and to radically change my thinking in many areas. That was the best thing that had happened to me since my first encounter with Jesus and His Spirit when I was 11 years of age.

A silently spreading Reformation
               And I am not the only one who has undergone such a change. It is spreading here in Ireland and also in Germany and other parts of Europe. I recently heard about an elderly man who was a believer all his life. For 50 years he sat in his Methodist church and kept quiet, enduring quite a miserable life and suffering from depression. Then he got in touch with the truth, was healed of depression and became a happy Christian who couldn't stop talking about God. He got kicked out of his church for that. I believe there is a paradigm shift happening in the church today that is similar in scope to that of the Reformation. Truth that has been lost for nearly 2000 years from the main stream of Christianity is being rediscovered and is changing lives. But it is also being resisted and persecuted by many a bible believing Christian. This is the new thing that God is doing. Instead of pouring out his Spirit in a massive eruption that would sweep over a country and then die out after a few months or years he is bringing about a fundamental change in people's thinking that has the potential of bringing the whole Christian church back to operating in the same degree of power and authority as depicted in the Acts of the Apostles. We live in exciting times!

The purpose of this blog
               I am picking up this blog to explain these paradigm shifts that God has revealed to me in sequence and in an orderly and structured manner. It is my heart's desire and my prayer that God will use these words to bring about the same liberation in many of my reader's lives as he has brought about in mine. Jesus' statement is still true. The truth does set us free. But it is only the truth that we know, that will have this effect. My people perish for a lack of knowledge... is also a true statement today. And it has to be heart knowledge - not merely intellectual agreement. Here lies a real problem - our hearts are much slower and much more stubborn than our minds. They have been hardened and conditioned by so many factors that even for very sincere Christians it can take quite a lot of effort and focus to really connect to the truth and go with it. That's why a halfhearted approach will never do. God's promise that Jeremiah wrote to the exiles is still true today for every one of us: "You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart!" (Jeremiah 29:13)

So next week I hope to continue by dealing with mental paradigms and the way they determine our perception of the world and of truth. How it is possible for a Christian to be reading the same words in the bible all their life and not be able to connect with the truth that they convey... Paradigms are very powerful. They can make you to be seeing, but never perceiving, hearing but never understanding... And the liberation that a shift from a wrong paradigm to a right one brings is beyond description. It is awesome. So bear with me.

Until next week,
Be blessed and encouraged!