http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15626513/escape-from-every-temptation
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The Awakening We Need: Why the Reformed Pray for Revival
The word revival speaks of life renewed. It’s about depletion lifted to restoration, refreshing reinvigoration. It’s about weary you and me reenergized with new sparkle in our eyes, new spring in our steps, new steel in our spines. And isn’t that very renewal our constant need?
God did not create us as perpetual motion machines, grinding life out by our own energies. He created us to need him, and to have him, in his fullness of “grace upon grace” (John 1:16). His endless grace meeting our endless need is why the gospel speaks of “newness of life” (Romans 6:4) as normative Christianity — not only at conversion, but constantly thereafter, even moment by moment.
How could it be otherwise? The Bible summarizes our earthly journey like this: “The Spirit helps us in our weakness” (Romans 8:26). It doesn’t speak of our “weaknesses” (plural) but of our “weakness” (singular). Why? Because it’s not as though we have a weakness in this area of life over here and another weakness in that area of life over there. The truth is, weakness pervades the whole of our existence. Weakness is not one more experience we have alongside other experiences. Rather, weakness is the platform on which we have all our experiences. We have never yet known a single moment of non-weakness. But the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness. And revival is a mighty surge of Spirit-given help for weak Christians like all of us.
What Is Revival?
What then is revival? Revival is ordinary Christians experiencing extraordinary power from on high, so that the gospel gets traction in us and through us with astonishing impact. It cannot be scheduled — not by us, anyway. It is of God.
My dad and mom were speaking at a Christian college in the early 1970s. The Holy Spirit was moving with reviving power. With happy wonder, the students kept saying, “Can you believe this is happening to us?” That is not the kind of comment we tend to make when we execute our own ministry plan really well. The divine and miraculous nature of authentic revival is why we make no allowance here for false, worked-up “revivals” of our own making.
We disagree with Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875), who famously said, “A revival of religion is not a miracle” (Lectures on Revivals of Religion, 10). Finney influenced later generations to believe that a revival is the result of “the right use of the constituted means.” I disagree. I see revival as a glorious mega-miracle.
The Bible encourages us to pursue this kind of revival with this wonderful prayer: “Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?” (Psalm 85:6). Let’s think that simple prayer through, asking three questions.
1. Who Does the Reviving?
God does: “Will you not revive us again?” In fact, the word you is emphatic in the Hebrew text. Revival is a work of God. That’s why we pray for revival.
Do we also labor toward revival? Yes. We always want to serve in such a way as to “prepare the way of the Lord” (Isaiah 40:3–5). Like Elijah, we build the altar. But it is God, and God alone, who sends down the sacred fire (1 Kings 18:30–39).
If our churches become swept up into any movement, any dynamic, generated by our own brilliance or cool, why should anyone even care? Why should we care? If our churches grow by socially acceptable forms of shrewd marketing and trendy programs, then we’re left with a tragedy: churches that are total failures brilliantly disguised as massive successes. We are to be living proof that the risen Jesus is actually moving in this world — and nothing less. That is success (if such a word even applies).
When our Lord above pours out his Spirit upon us (Acts 2:33), he lifts us into new experiences of his wonder-working grace, with surprising conversions, hidden sins openly confessed, broken relationships tenderly restored, timid Christians publicly emboldened, and so forth. That miracle is revival. To quote the title of a J.I. Packer book, it is “God in our midst.” When this happens, a merely routinized Christianity crumbles, yielding to the powers of revived Christianity.
Jonathan Edwards certainly understood revival this way — as an intervention by God. It’s why, in his writings about the First Great Awakening, he had to use words like surprising, remarkable, extraordinary, and wonderful to describe what he saw happening. Far from threatening Reformed theology, the God-centeredness of revival validates Reformed theology.
And the great thing about the miracle of revival is that we, even we, can receive it. We can be as unimpressive as we truly are, but with the gospel and the Holy Spirit, we simple, plodding, and sometimes exhausted Christians are equipped in every essential to receive afresh the felt presence of the risen Christ with powerful effect.
2. Who Needs Revival?
We do. The people of God need revival: “Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?” Does the world need revival too? Of course. In fact, the old prophecy declares that “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Habakkuk 2:14). And our Lord won’t stop until the very “trees of the forest sing for joy” (Psalm 96:12)! But revival starts among us, his own people.
“Revival is a work of God. That’s why we pray for revival.”
Can we deny that we need revival? Over the last decade or so, we Bible-believing Christians in America have suffered significant losses. We were surging forward. Personally, looking around at the gospel-driven movements among us, I was thinking, “If we stay low before the Lord and steward this blessing wisely, this could accelerate into historic awakening over the next ten or twenty years.”
But we’ve faltered. Our moral failures, our doctrinal betrayals, our relational fractures — we have taken many hits. From my vantage point, we are not in the position of strength we were just a few years ago.
If we think we don’t need revival, how much further must we fall before our hearts break and we humble ourselves? I believe that we orthodox, serious-minded, gospel-loving Christians need revival — now. Let’s seek the Lord for it.
3. What Difference Does Revival Make?
A wonderful difference! “Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?” Revival gushes with overflowing joy in Christ. It is so cheering to get right with God and with one another, to get free from past regrets, to stop hanging back in timidity and face the future with new confidence in the One who holds “all authority in heaven and on earth” (Matthew 28:18).
I remember a turning point in my own life during the Jesus Movement of the late 1960s. It was my junior year in college. I was tied up in knots with doubts about Christ. My deepest foundations were being shaken by some bad teaching. Then God mercifully moved in on me, when some friends invited me to a Christian rock concert on New Year’s Eve 1969.
When I walked in that evening, my heart was heavy with doubt. Three hours later, I floated out with a joy I had never known before. What made the difference? Not a brilliant argument (though I certainly respect brilliant arguments). No, God gave me something deeper, and even primal. He gave me happy certainty. He gave me joy from above, as a first-order, self-authenticating, direct and immediate experience of Reality — his very presence.
That night, I was sitting in the Pasadena Civic Auditorium with my friends, minding my own business. The curtains parted. There stood a rock band of “Jesus freaks” with their long hair and electric guitars. They began to play. Imagine a mash-up of Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. I loved it.
But what got me was their simple message. The song that absolutely wrecked me riffed on this call-and-response lyric: “Jesus loves me; I love Jesus.” (Needless to say, this was not the traditional children’s song “Jesus Loves Me”!) These direct, honest, uncomplicated gospel words landed on me as an astonishingly bright and luminous new thought.
Prayers We Won’t Regret
By God’s reviving power, on that night in Pasadena, his message was experientialized to my heart as real — more real than anything else in all this world. It entered my being at a level down beneath my doubts. Those words exploded in my experience with a joy I could not deny — and I didn’t want to. Naturally, I still had many questions, and even more questions. But now I was free to think it all through with a joyous confidence that Jesus offered everything I was seeking. And I’ve never been the same since.
What if we examine ourselves for every trace of improperly limited Christian experience? What if we dare to ask the Lord to lead us into fresh green pastures and beside new still waters, so that we rejoice in him as never before? What if we let him decide whether our Christianity today is all that he can give us? What if all we offer him is our humble openness — our open Bibles with our open hearts? Do we really fear that we would ultimately regret going that low before our gracious Lord and Savior?
“Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?” May Psalm 85:6 grab our hearts and never let us go!
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The Safest Man for Women: A Guide Toward Sexual Purity
I can remember exactly where I was sitting, wrestling with guilt and shame and regret over failed relationships and sexual sin, wondering if I would ever overcome my broken history, when a friend recited Micah 7:8–9 from memory:
Rejoice not over me, O my enemy; when I fall, I shall rise;when I sit in darkness, the Lord will be a light to me.I will bear the indignation of the Lord because I have sinned against him,until he pleads my cause and executes judgment for me.He will bring me out to the light; I shall look upon his vindication.
God pleads my cause. The one I betrayed kneeled down to appeal for me. His gavel landed, not on me, but on his Son. Having lived and hidden in darkness, I found a home in the light. The purity I thought I had lost was now suddenly and undeservedly possible.
As we raise up younger men in the church, and encourage them toward becoming men of God, how can we call them into the kind of freedom and purity God gave me in Christ?
Set an Example in Purity
Of course, raising up godly men is about far more than sexual purity. A man of God is more than his self-control in dating relationships. He’s more than his last Internet accountability report — far more. When grace grips a man, it more than curbs his lust for porn; it lights fires for good under every area of his life. And so, young men need strong, dynamic, ambitious pictures of what they might become in Christ.
Fortunately, God gives us plenty of great lessons on manhood in his word. First Timothy 4:12 has become one especially concise and compelling picture for me:
Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity.
The apostle Paul gives Timothy, his son in the faith, five cues for spiritual growth and development. The areas are not exclusive to men, but they are each critical for godly men. Each of those five words is a battlefield to be won, and each can become its own stronghold for holiness. Do this man’s conversations consistently say he belongs to God? Does his lifestyle set him apart from the unbelieving? Is he a man of surprising and sacrificial love? Does he fight for faith in the trenches of temptation and doubt? Is he pure?
In previous articles, we looked more closely at the first four — speech, conduct, love, and faith. Here we turn to purity, the area that may receive the most attention in young men’s discipleship (often for good reason), and yet often in ways that miss the heart of Christian purity.
In All Purity
First, what kind of purity did the apostle have in mind? The only other use of this Greek word in the New Testament — agneia — comes just one chapter later in the same letter:
Encourage [an older man] as you would a father, younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, younger women as sisters, in all purity. (1 Timothy 5:1–2)
This suggests the purity Paul had in mind was sexual purity — a broad and consistent holiness that marks all of Timothy’s relationships with his sisters in Christ. Purity is bigger and wider than personal sexual morality, but sex and sexuality (then and certainly now) play a major role in setting followers of Christ apart from the world. Man of God, as you encourage younger women in the church, do so with purity. Don’t talk, behave, or daydream in ways that make them vulnerable to serve your lusts. Put to death sexual immorality within you (Colossians 3:5). Flee from sexual temptation (1 Corinthians 6:18). Treat young women with the respect and concern with which you would treat your own sisters — because they are (Matthew 12:50).
“Be the safest man on earth for a young woman to meet.”
And not just purity, Timothy, but all purity. Don’t treat women just slightly better than men in the world do, but wholly differently. When other men flirt with ambiguous messages and signals, be surprisingly clear and honest. When other men secretly gratify their lusts, make moments alone a training ground for self-control. When other men dishonor themselves and others through sexual sin, be a man who loves to honor and protect women. Don’t look for the lowest bar to crawl over, but be ambitiously pure — love any women God has put in your life with all purity. Be the safest man on earth for a young woman to meet.
‘Husband of One Wife’
Earlier in his letter to the younger Timothy, the apostle gives at least one other glimpse into how godly men relate to sex and sexuality.
When he names qualifications for pastor-elders, the majority of the list simply pictures a normal godly man, whether he ever serves in church office or not. He must be “sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, . . . not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money” (1 Timothy 3:2–3). These qualities mark every mature man who follows Jesus. And according to that same list, such a man is also “the husband of one wife” (1 Timothy 3:2).
Now, Paul did not mean that an elder could not be single. Paul himself was unmarried, after all, and he was not only an elder, but an apostle. No, more fundamentally, this is a way of saying men of God are to be sexually pure. They are men, whether married or not, who refuse to indulge themselves sexually (in thought or action or suggestion) with any woman but their wife. “The husband of one wife” (literally, “one-woman man”) is a concise way of saying, “Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous” (Hebrews 13:4).
So, do our thoughts and hands and clicks honor the spiritual wonder and purity of marriage? Or, when asked by God himself to stand guard along the walls around the marriage bed, have we instead gone missing? Worse, have we turned and fired the arrows he gave us against him and the women he has made? Have we indulged lustful thoughts, lengthy glances, wicked searches, sensual touching, sexual impatience, and self-gratification? Have we used God’s gift of sex to assault the hands that gave it?
Purity Tells the Story
Why would men of God be “the husband of one wife”? Because God has made marriage and sex an unusually compelling way of drawing attention to Christ and his love for his bride, the church.
It’s not the only way, by any means. Jesus himself never married. And single believers in Jesus often experience more of Jesus than married believers do (1 Corinthians 7:35). But from the beginning, God has joined one man with one woman, for one lifetime, to tell the world physically and relationally (though certainly imperfectly) about the depth and duration of his love for us (Ephesians 5:31–32). The fire in a new husband’s eyes is a flicker of the roaring flames in heaven. The brilliance of a bride, wrapped and radiant in white, is a glimmer of what it means for the church to be chosen, wooed, won, and made pure.
And so how men (and women!) treat sex and sexuality, whether married or not, sheds light on Christ for all to see, or obscures and slanders him. The world has found countless ways to distort, abuse, and vandalize God’s masterpiece, but the added darkness has served to make true purity a brighter and clearer picture of reality. Few phenomena are more spiritually revealing and provocative today than a man who consistently denies his sinful flesh and makes war against sexual temptation. It will make him an alien in the eyes of the world — and a king in the eyes that matter most.
Purity for Sexual Failures
What if we’ve already failed sexually? What if we’ve already spurned purity and fired our arrows back at God? Have we been dishonorably discharged and forever branded with our worst thoughts and actions? Is sexual purity possible for sexual failures?
It is — and I should know. Pornography and sexual immorality plagued me for years, even after coming to know Jesus. I know what it looks like to fire arrows at God because I was often pointing the bow. Sexual repentance, to my shame, was a decade-long war. I indulged desires outside of marriage that were meant to lead me to a bride. I flirted and dodged and disappeared in dating. I dishonored sisters in Christ, women whom Jesus had bought with his blood and who had entrusted themselves to me, a brother. With my thoughts and hands and clicks, I slandered the Lion of Judah and concealed his wondrous cross. I squandered opportunity after opportunity to be the man I knew God wanted me to be.
But God pled my cause. He brought me out into the light. After I had fired my arrows against him, he intervened and took my thorns, my nails, my wrath. “I received mercy for this reason, that in me, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience” (1 Timothy 1:16). By his grace, he forgave what I had done, and by that same grace, he trained my hands, my thoughts, my words for good. He made a once impure man pure — not perfectly, but genuinely.
“Stories of sexual brokenness have their own way of honoring the worth of Christ and his cross.”
Stories of sexual brokenness have their own way of honoring the worth of Christ and his cross. God wired sexual purity and marital fidelity to sing the truth about Jesus — a soaring and mesmerizing melody — but he sings something just as captivating over harlots, like me, who leave our sexual sin for him.
Pure Men Move Toward Women
One more lesson from Paul’s counsel to Timothy: setting an example in sexual purity does not mean avoiding women in the church. Notice the posture in his charge to the younger man: “Encourage . . . younger women as sisters, in all purity” (1 Timothy 5:1–2).
He could have said, “Play it safe and just keep your distance,” but instead he says, “Encourage younger women as sisters” — care for them like you would if they grew up next to you. Move toward them, Timothy. Look for ways to give courage — to strengthen their hearts in the Lord and their resolves to love. The picture here is the opposite of the kind of divide that can emerge between men and women in churches and ministries. To be sure, there may be certain women to avoid (Proverbs 5:3–8). Generally speaking, however, men of God do not sidestep their sisters in Christ, but engage and care for them in all purity. In other words, they treat women like Jesus did.
Safest Man for Women
When you stop to look, Jesus spends a surprising amount of time caring specifically and personally for women — in a day when these kinds of interactions were more socially scandalous. Even the disciples marveled at how he would stop and talk to women (John 4:27).
Listen to the warmth and tenderness in Jesus’s voice when a seriously ill woman grabs the edge of his garment: “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace” (Luke 8:48). When he finds the woman at the well, with her deeply broken and painful history, he doesn’t look the other way or scramble to another well, but offers to refresh and restore her soul: “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water” (John 4:10).
When he saw the woman horribly disabled by a demon, he “called her over and said to her, ‘Woman, you are freed from your disability.’ And he laid his hands on her, and immediately she was made straight, and she glorified God” (Luke 13:12–13). He reached out and touched her, in all purity, because that’s what a good brother would have done. When he saw a mother grieving over the death of her son, he drew near to her broken heart. “He had compassion on her and said to her, ‘Do not weep’” (Luke 7:13).
And when he rose from the grave, what was the first name on his death-conquering lips? “Jesus said to her, ‘Mary’” (John 20:16). This is the truest, most manly picture of purity the world has ever seen — a man abstaining not from his sisters, but from mistreating them or neglecting their needs. A man who consistently and profoundly encouraged women in all purity.
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Will My Children Forsake the Faith? How Mothers Instill the Truth
Spaghetti sauce bubbles in a pot on the stove, the rich red depths of the kettle wafting fragrance throughout the house. The annual ritual spans three decades: garden-grown tomatoes, handpicked and placed into a basket, become jars of winter provision. After all, my four sons could eat a lot of pasta.
But this pot of spaghetti sauce is different — momentous, really, because it’s not mine. My son and his wife grew these tomatoes in their own garden and brought them to my kitchen for transformation. “Canning for dummies!” they say with a chuckle, inviting me to hover over them throughout the process as we puree, add spices, watch over the slow simmer, and then preserve the thick, fragrant sauce in hot glass jars.
“Twelve quarts!” they exclaim as they high-five each other.
Having homeschooled my sons through high school, I’d like to think this isn’t the first time I’ve taught them something. I’d be kidding myself, though, if I imagined they always received my teaching with the same willing enthusiasm of this canning lesson. Unlike a daily algebra class or my arguments for a broad knowledge of world history, this day’s learning experience required no defense.
While gardening and canning are valuable life skills, Solomon had bigger things on his mind when he exhorted his son, “Forsake not your mother’s teaching” (Proverbs 1:8). Teaching here refers to direction, instruction, or even law. As mothers, we stand beside fathers in imparting the gospel to our families. In both structured teaching and purposeful living, truth is passed on and worn like “a graceful garland” on the heads of our sons and daughters (Proverbs 1:9).
Of course, the weighty question lands with a thud in parenting conversations for every life stage: How can parents pass along a vibrant faith? How can we communicate the truth we believe in a way that will not be forsaken by our children and our grandchildren?
Reminder in Chief
We know from Scripture that Peter, Jesus’s outspoken fisherman-turned-apostle, was married, and the fatherly tone of his second letter makes me wonder if he was also a parent. Step by step, Peter describes a kind of incremental discipleship, in which faith is supplemented “with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love” (2 Peter 1:5–7). He sounds almost like a mother teaching her son how to make and preserve spaghetti sauce in simple, orderly steps.
Peter follows his instruction with a gentle warning: “Whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins” (2 Peter 1:9). Even though his readers have heard the truth before, Peter understands that even believers who know the truth need to hear the truth, and then hear it again. Instead of expressing frustration over the need to repeat himself, he celebrates his role as “Reminder of the Truth.” He writes, “Therefore I intend always to remind you of these qualities, though you know them and are established in the truth that you have” (2 Peter 1:12).
As a mother, you may find yourself serving as Reminder in Chief in your home, and, like Peter, it’s your privilege — and responsibility — to “make every effort” to establish your children in the truth (2 Peter 1:5, 12). Naturally, this will look very different at every stage of parenting, as your sons and daughters change from children to teens, teens to adults.
1. Reminding Children
We’re laying a foundation in the years of early childhood. I remember well that my teaching and training had to be repetitive, simple, and scriptural. Regular routines of family devotions and the steady input of my example instructed my four sons with and without a word.
The books, movies, and other media we chose reinforced our teaching of godly living. My apologies for outbursts of temper or moments of impatience reminded my boys that I was also in the process of sanctification.
Like Peter, it was my intention “always to remind” my children of the beauty of the Christian life and the God behind that life (2 Peter 1:12). My four sons had four very different ways of being in the world, requiring me to become a student of their unique personalities. What connected with and communicated well for one child would likely completely miss his brother.
No matter what the culture at large may say, as the parent you are the main “reminder” in your children’s life. By grace, you can be the strongest, steadiest, and most compelling voice in their ears.
2. Reminding Teens
There were seasons of life with our teens when we felt as if we were holding onto the reins of a runaway horse. When you’re being dragged at high speed, it’s hard to think rationally. We didn’t always know precisely what to do, but we knew we had to hold on tight. And now we’re thankful that we didn’t let go!
I’m grateful to have had the gift of consistently building the truth into our children since birth. If this is your story as well, your teens may very well be on their way to having a sincere love for God and a biblical worldview that will carry them safely into adulthood. With that foundation in place, it may be time to soften your reminding role — but certainly not time to abandon it.
In the spirit of Peter’s epistle, why not send a short note commending your son or daughter for some trait that displays godliness and encourages your heart? A verse in a lunch box, a well-chosen book with a well-timed message, an open-door policy that says, “Every topic of conversation is fair game here” — practices like these will go a long way toward reminding your almost-grown children that faith in Jesus is a vital part of life and that you are willing to accompany them on their journey.
3. Reminding Adults?
For most of us, the longest phase of parenthood begins when our children leave home and become independent. Our role certainly changes, but our job is not done. For the rest of our days, for good or for ill, we will be living “a reminding life” before our adult children. How we honor boundaries, make room in our hearts for in-laws, respond to our grandchildren, and negotiate the inevitable disagreements that arise will either become a barrier or a bridge.
In 2022, I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a progressive and debilitating neurological disorder. While it has always been my goal to model strength for my children, I’m now discovering how to wisely model a gracious acceptance of weakness balanced by persevering discipline. I submit to the daily exercise routine that allows me to care for baby grandchildren and chase toddlers. And as I do, I work carefully at showing them what it means to maintain my focus on the things that are unseen and eternal (2 Corinthians 4:18).
Perhaps the teaching opportunities we have not chosen, but which have nonetheless been assigned to us by our wise, loving, good, and sovereign heavenly Father, will have the most lasting influence on our families.
A Reminding Life
With a new grandbaby due any day, there will be fifteen Morins who will continue to receive loving reminders from me, because I agree with Peter: “I think it right, as long as I am in this body, to stir you up by way of reminder” (2 Peter 1:13).
May our children embrace and not forsake the teaching that we impart throughout all the ages and stages of their lives, including the lessons that come to us in unexpected ways. As godly mothers and grandmothers, let’s embrace the weighty joy of living a reminding life.