On Shining Shoes in Penance

And welcome to The Dividing Line on a Friday afternoon, right before the weekend, which in June normally would have meant people going out boating and stuff like that. Here in Arizona, it means that you can get a $250 fine for not wearing your mask in public places.

Of course, the coronavirus cannot survive more than about 1 .2 seconds in Arizona, but hey, and of course you can't get infected outdoors anyways, but hey, it's all about submission. Did you see the, I posted a picture, what was that?

Oh, I posted a picture of my, need to turn off WhatsApp, of the mask that I ordered, I don't know if you saw it or not, you didn't see it? Oh yeah, I posted it on Facebook. It'll almost be worth wearing it, just as the protest that it is, but you know, there you go.

Anyway, weekend edition here, we will keep it to one hour, despite the fact that Rich just stretched Romans chapter 13 to the breaking point. The cops say they will not finish the arrest of Mr. Pierce until after the program's over.

They're being very kind. They're actually sitting down and listening in, that'd be great. We're going to start a revival in the Phoenix and Glendale and Peoria. It was a multi-agency chase, but in the police departments, we're going to start a revival after they listen to the program today.

So we just promised not to pull any statues down and they're like, we like you. And so that's how that's working. Anyway, on to important things in the gospel of John chapter 13, beginning of verse three, it's always important.

The Upper Room Ministry of Jesus in John 13–17

I think it's very important. I think it would be a really great thing, a high priority thing if people would learn to outline the gospels and especially New Testament books, but some of the Old Testament books as well.

So you can find things and see more of the flow of the thought in John, the gospel of John. It's important, for example, that John chapter 12 is the end of Jesus' public ministry. And that's when you have the Greeks coming and Jesus does not meet with the Greeks.

And that's the context of drawing all men to himself. It's all kinds of men there. But then chapters 13, 14, 15, and 16 are Jesus' personal ministry to his disciples. And you might include chapter 17 in that, the high priestly prayer.

That's the real Lord's prayer. That, I think, was really the climax of his personal ministry to the disciples when you think about it. Can you imagine what it would have been like to have heard that? And a lot of people at times will say, well, see, John's just making stuff up.

He's writing A historically later on. No, it would make perfect sense to me why, when writing Matthew, Mark, and Luke, that the disciples would not have included the content of that only for John to do that at a later point in time.

Anyway, the point is that John 13 through 16 is the personal ministry of the Lord Jesus to his disciples before his crucifixion, burial, resurrection, and ascension. And it is in that context that you have the establishment of the Lord's Supper.

You have the issues in regards to the dating, you know, which day of the week. We've addressed that only recently here on the program. But in John chapter 13, beginning of verse 3, we have this incident, Jesus knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands and that he had come forth from God and was going back to God, got up from supper and laid aside his garments and taking a towel, he girded himself.

Then he poured water into the basin and began to wash the disciples' feet and to wipe them with the towel with which he was girded. So, he came to Simon Peter and he said to him, Lord, do you wash my feet?

Jesus answered and said to him, what I do you do not realize now, but you will understand hereafter. Peter said to him, never shall you wash my feet. Jesus answered, if I do not wash you, you do not have any part with me.

Simon Peter said to him, Lord, then wash not only my feet, but also my hands and my head. Jesus said to him, he who has bathed needs only to wash his feet, but is completely clean and you are clean, but not all of you.

For he knew the one who is betraying him and for this reason, he said, not all of you are clean. So, when he had washed their feet and taken his garments and reclined at the table again, he said to them, do you know what I have done to you?

You call me teacher and Lord, and you're right for so I am. If I then the Lord and the teacher washed your feet, you ought also to wash one another's feet. For I gave you an example that you should also do as I did to you.

Truly, truly, I say to you, a slave is not greater than his master, nor is the one who is sent greater than the one who sent him. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them. I do not speak of all of you.

I know the ones I have chosen, but it is that the scripture may be fulfilled. He who eats my bread has lifted up his heel against me. And he goes on from there. We have here the story of Jesus washing the disciples' feet.

And it is interesting. There are some, well, I really only know one. There's probably some other denominations that take this as a ordinance of the Lord. That is, they have three ordinances. They would have baptism, the Lord's supper, and the washing of feet.

But what unites baptism and the Lord's supper is their portrayal of the gospel, which is not something that is specifically laid out in the symbolic nature of the washing of the feet. So, in this incident, the master ministers to the servants.

And he does so as a demonstration of the washing that is going to be theirs. And yet it is not as, you know, as Peter says, you know, you'll never wash my feet. And Jesus says, and you'll have no part of me.

Well, then wash my head and my hands. This is, he who has been washed needs only to have his feet washed, which of course, there is a cultural aspect to this. The streets of the day were not like our streets today.

They were not paved. They were not only dirty and dusty, but they would also be filled with animal excrement and things like that. And so it was necessary to clean that off when you entered in, especially because you're not looking at a table like we have today.

The tables are very low to the ground. And so it was just a necessity to be able to do these types of things. But here you have the washing of feet and Jesus does it to the disciples. And it is not a rebuke of the disciples.

It's not the demonstration that Jesus is embarrassed by something he's done, anything along these lines. And this is the only biblical example we have. Do I think there would ever be a time or place for this?

Well, yeah, I could see that. I've only experienced it once in my life and it was a pretty powerful moment actually, but it may have been because it was the only time I'd ever experienced it. I suppose if it was a repetitious thing, it might not be quite as a powerful thing.

But either my junior or senior year in high school, we were at a summer youth camp and the youth minister, you know, every summer youth camp is supposed to have that super high spiritual point, you know, that you sort of go home glowing from that particular thing.

And that was what this was supposed to be. And the youth minister did this. He washed the students' feet and read from John chapter 13. And it was appropriate. It wasn't done in a cheesy fashion. So you could certainly see something along those lines in the context of John chapter 13.

Critique of the Chick-fil-A and Lecrae Shoe-Shining Video

Now you might be going, why in the world are you talking about John chapter 13 and washing your feet? Well, as most of you know, over the, well, sometime yesterday, I guess this happened. And I guess this was posted before the program yesterday.

I just had not seen it. But the CEO of Chick-fil-A, Mr. Cathy, was on the Passion City Church program with Lecrae. And well, do you have this? Yeah. I'll back it up a little bit here so we have a little bit of a context.

Yeah, I suppose we do need to hear what's being said as well. So let's look at this here. And I was concerned about that. We just have a spinning, spinning, spinning thing. So let's unspin it and try this again.

Dr. Darrell Bock Story that was shared with me and tears began to flow in that service. It was an attitude of conviction. So I invite folks just to put some words to action here. And if we need to find somebody that needs to have their shoe shine, we need to just go right on over and shine their shoes.

And whether they got tennis shoes on or not, maybe they got sandals on. It really doesn't matter. But there's a time in which we need to have some personal action here. Maybe we need to give them a hug too, brother.

And some stock in Chick-fil-A. But I bought about 1 ,500 of these and I gave to all our Chick-fil-A operators and staff a number of years ago. And so any expressions of a contrite heart, of a sense of humility, a sense of shame, a sense of embarrassment began with an apologetic heart.

I think that's...

Okay. So you saw shame, embarrassment, an apologetic heart. And evidently, this is something that is to be done to black people. That is the idea. A sense of shame and embarrassment for racism. This, of course, went viral yesterday and I saw it right after the program and said, well, it's probably best that the program's over.

I didn't think there'd be a dividing line today. There almost wasn't. We live in a day where, again, emotions and feelings are determinative for everything. And here is a situation where you have someone who feels like they need to do something.

And so today is now the day of gestures, signaling your support, and experiencing feelings of guilt for things that you had nothing to do with. But you've been taught that because of your privilege, because of the color of your skin, that you need to be guilty.

And so a lot of people want to get rid of their guilt. And so here you have a very, very wealthy man walking over to another very, very wealthy man and pretending to shine his sneakers, which you can't really do with a brush in the first place.

But it's all symbolic. And the problem is that it doesn't accomplish anything. There's no forgiveness to be found. You're going to have to do it again the next time and then the next time. And of course, it's a rather difficult thing to watch in light of his saying, well, you need to find someone.

Well, what he meant was you need to find a black person. And you need to go shine a black person's shoes. Now, I remember, I don't know, about 10 years ago, I think he passed away. At least that's what the other shoeshine guys told me.

But there used to be a shoeshine stand in the airport terminal in St. Louis where U .S. Airways and then American, they merged, would land. And I would go there every December. I have been going there this year.

Lord willing, it'll be 20 years going to St. Louis first weekend in December. Well, the first year wasn't the first weekend in December. It was during the summer. But ever since then, it's been the first weekend in December.

And so I got to know a black man who had a shoeshine thing there in the airport. And if I was wearing shoes that could be shined, I would try to see him because he was a neat guy and he talked about his family.

And we just, it was, and he was good. That was, that was the other thing is not all, not everybody you run into there in the airport is all that good at what they do. But then there are some guys who really know how to, I mean, you know, that shine would last for a long time.

It was really, really well done and sort of like getting a new pair of shoes. So I would tip him real well. And then one year he wasn't there. And the next year somebody else was there and I asked and he had, he had passed away, unfortunately.

But I never ever felt like somehow I was superior to that man because he did shoe shining and I don't do shoe shining. I, I know I could not shine a pair of shoes. I was never in the military. So I needed his help.

Sometimes my shoes just look terrible, but it never crossed my mind that that made me somehow better than him. I, it never crossed my mind that I was somehow showing myself to be superior to him or anything along those lines whatsoever.

I just, he offered a service and I took advantage of the service. So I'm not sure where the idea comes that this, this somehow is showing some, it's not the same thing as the washing of feet. When Jesus washed the disciples feet, he was demonstrating that even though he is the master, he demonstrates his servanthood by serving his slaves.

He even used that terminology. Sorry, it's there in the Bible. I'm sure somebody will change it soon because it's no longer politically correct, but that's what he did. And that's, that's part of the entire Christian message is that the one who created all things entered into his own creation to serve his, his people.

That's a very different concept than shining somebody's shoes, especially out of a sense of shame and embarrassment for racism. Now, if you've been a racist, if you have, um, and I mean, I mean a biblical racist, the term racism as it is used, being used in our society right now has no meaning because right now, as it is being used in our society, it means you're a white person who breathes.

There can be no moral culpability attached to that concept, and so it's a meaningless statement. But the old definition of racism, the meaningful one, the only meaningful one, is a sin, and if you are guilty of that sin, if you have experienced that in your life, shining a black man's shoes is not going to change any of that.

The Christian message is this is something you repent of, and you don't repent of it to somebody else, repent of it to God. Now, if you did something where you, um, because of your racism hurt someone else and you can still contact that person and make it right, then do it.

But what we just saw was an example of how to divide the Christian church and how to bring in a false gospel. That's what we just saw. This attitude does not understand that both of these men, and I don't know Mr. Cathy, I've met Lecrae.

It was, there's some thing going on, I think, this weekend celebrating blackness with Tadashi and Lecrae and part of that whole crew, and I, it was just too sad for me to do it, but I almost dug out the picture of me with those guys from 2007.

They were here in the valley. This is why I got on Twitter was so that I could contact him. And I came out and set up my projector and I did a whole presentation for them. And then we sat around and talked about the hypostatic union and it was great.

It was all before what has happened since then. So it's just, I just didn't put it up because it was just too sad. But here you have two Christian men who in Orthodox Christianity stand before God on the exact same ground.

Their skin color is irrelevant. Their ancestors are irrelevant. The fact is they're both, they were both sinners, justly condemned by God for their sin, who have been graciously redeemed by the same savior, by the imputation of the same righteousness, and they're indwelled by the same spirit.

And so to get down on the ground and do some type of meaningless shoeshine out of a sense of guilt from your ancestors, your ancestors, is to basically say, we really don't believe what we've said we've believed all along.

And that is that we are, that the ground is level before the cross and that all of that has been wiped out. That God has removed our transgressions as far as the East is from the West, but not as far as the history books.

East and West, that sounds great because that's an infinite distance, but we really don't believe that. You continue to have guilt even after being made a Christian that you have to expiate constantly through a constant attitude of penance.

That's what you have to do. The woke church has no forgiveness. It has no justification. It's just a constant, it's Rome. It's a constant treadmill of penances that never actually accomplish anything.

It's a sacrifice that is ineffective. Shining somebody's shoes does nothing. I said shining somebody's. It's hard to say. Shining someone's shoes is not an expiatory act. And if it actually makes you feel good, if it actually makes you feel that your white guilt is being removed, you're deceiving yourself.

It does nothing. And I cannot imagine if someone tried to walk up to me out of some misplaced sense of guilt and shine my shoes. I'm standing up and backing away and say, brother, stand up. Don't you dare.

Don't you dare. Never gonna let that happen. Uh-uh. No way. Because that's saying you need to be doing something because of your ethnicity that I don't have to do. This is the horrific danger and result of accepting the absolutely inane idea that a black person cannot be a racist.

That there are certain sins that you can't commit because you don't have power, as if needing to have power was definitional of being able to commit the sin. And what we see going on right now, but within the Christian context, this type of behavior is absolutely positively indefensible.

And it should trouble every single one of you, no matter how sold out you are to the need, well, we've got to do something. Well, that something means you don't believe that Christ has already done everything.

That pressure that you feel to do something is coming from somewhere other than scripture and the Holy Spirit of God. It's cultural, it's based on a false narrative, and it results in this type of thing.

The 2020 Social Justice Statement and the Infiltration of the Church

It was two years ago today that a group of us met in Dallas, Texas. Today is Charles Haddon Spurgeon's birthday, and it is also John MacArthur's birthday. John MacArthur is born 105 years to the day after Charles Haddon Spurgeon was.

And so today is John's 81st birthday, I believe. I think it was 79 when we met in Dallas. As I mentioned on Facebook, I was very thankful for the fact that when we had birthday cake for John MacArthur's birthday at that meeting, and there are some pictures of us that were posted today.

So Vody was there, and Josh Bice, and myself, and others. Tom Buck was there, and thankfully, the birthday cake was a real birthday cake. I don't know what happened. I think this was when civilization started to break down.

But sometime during my life, people started making these cakes that are all almost air, there's no substance to them, you can't tell there's any butter in them at all, with frosting that I think you could blow off.

When you blow the candles out, the frosting blows off too. It's so light, it's so fluffy, there's nothing to it, has no taste, it just covers the cake. And I believe this was the end of civilization, personally, I really do.

Because a cake needs to have some body to it, it needs to have butter in it, and frosting should be mainly sugar. Okay, this frou-frou frosting is the definite sign of the degeneration of a society, there's no question about it.

So the point is, John MacArthur's birthday cake that we had two years ago in Dallas when we met and were discussing the social justice movement, which eventually led to the statement later in the year, was a real birthday cake.

It was. I really had to hold myself back to not ask if we could have seconds. I didn't want to look like a complete pig. But it was good. It was really, really, really good. So I don't know where it came from, maybe the place that we met, I don't know.

But it was, it was great. It was great. But that was two years ago today, it seems like two lifetimes ago, in many ways. We could not have foreseen the exact playing out of this stuff. I certainly could not have foreseen that this movement would result in the complete disintegration of law and order in the streets, of people burning buildings down and whacking other people over the head with a skateboard.

And then they are released without charges for the sake of racial equity, racial reconciliation, and the like. But we've certainly seen that our concerns were completely justified in the church in regards to what has happened, the massive infiltration, which had already taken place at the time that we met.

That's why we met. The massive infiltration into denominational structures, seminaries, institutions, the people were already there, and they already had the reins of power. And it was just simply a matter of waiting for the right opportunity to throw the lever.

Something had happened just a few weeks earlier with the MLK 50 thing. And that's when it really started, you really started seeing, wait a minute, these people that we have been doing conferences with are now using methods of exegesis and emphasizing things that they never did before.

What's going on? And what has played out since then has been a pretty strong confirmation of how important it was to write that document. And I've noticed that there has been an uptick, a a re-ignition of interest in the statement since the society has started to fall apart.

And we see the virtue signaling Christian leaders literally closing their churches, but then telling their people to go protest. And they were part of the virtue signaling crowd back then too, just things absolutely upside down.

So that was two years ago today, as far as the date goes, obviously, that that took place. And then a few weeks later, the statement began to take shape and form, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Why the Woke Gospel Replaces the Gospel of Christ

And so we face some serious challenges in the church today because so many have been brought, I was explaining to a dear brother today, a statement you've heard me say many, many times before, what you win them with is what you win them to.

And what we are discovering very, very plainly is that the church is now filled with individuals who were one, quote unquote, with a message that appealed to their emotions rather than to the facts of the gospel, the fact of their sinfulness, the fact of the redemptive acts of God in the past, the cross, the resurrection, and hence resulting in a serious ability to hear the, a serious ability to hear, sorry about that, Siri was, oh, I said serious again, remember?

It did it again. Sorry, Siri, shut up. A serious ability to hear the call of Christ to come, deny yourself, take up the cross, follow me. The lordship of Christ determines the nature of discipleship. And when you bring people into the church under the banner of God really needs you, the primary message of the cross is that Jesus really needs you.

And he did this because he loved you so much. Nothing about sin, nothing about the holiness of God, nothing about repentance. When you make the message all about the individual, what you win them with is what you win them to.

They're going to come into the church with this man-centeredness that you have helped to reaffirm by the way you've presented the gospel. You have reaffirmed their own self-centeredness. The real message is that someone other than yourself is lord.

The lordship of Christ, king of creation, king of kings, lord of lords, and I identify not myself by my race, ethnicity, social standing. I identify with him by denying myself, which includes, by the way, your ethnicity.

Any special claims you would make, you deny them. Half the day I have to sit around here and deny to Rich the claims he makes on the basis of his French heritage. So that's just part of what has to be done.

I think you just fell off the chair in the other room. You deny yourself those things. You don't affirm those things. And then you join the death march. That's what taking up your cross means. It's not wearing a cross.

That's fine to do, but that's not what Jesus was talking about. To take up your cross, the only time anyone would take up a cross is when they are on their way to their place of execution. I know we've got street preachers that walk around with crosses today.

Nobody did that in Jesus' day. I'm not saying that's wrong. I'm just simply saying that's a really modern thing, especially the wheel part. To take up the cross meant to join the death march, and no one ever came back from that.

No one ever came back from that. Crucifixion was an exceptionally effective mechanism of execution. And so to take up your cross meant leave it all behind, identify with Jesus and him alone, and be ready to die.

Because in essence, you have been joined to his death. So you take up his cross. This is why the early church was able to be the early church, made up of men from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation, because everything that would have divided them, everything that would have made one person, one rich man stand up and go over to another rich man and scrub his shoes, was understood to have been dealt with, removed, as far as the East is from the West, in the experience of union with Christ itself.

Washed away in the waters of baptism. Repentance removed away. Whatever other terminology, whatever pictures you want to use, there was this radical break with the past, and this is the grave danger of the woke gospel.

I have been saying from the start that the woke movement turns your head away from the future and focuses you constantly on the past. Now, there is obviously, there's always a way to say, oh, but we need to be constantly thinking about what Christ has done.

And in the Lord's Supper, we're looking back. Yes, that's, we are looking at what God has done. But we are not looking to the past to nurture our victimhood. We are not looking to the past to nurture our feelings of guilt or shame, or feelings of guilt and shame in somebody else.

Those things have been dealt with in Christ, which is why there is no Jew or Greek. There is no Scythian or barbarian. There are no ethnic boundaries in that way. You're all one in Christ Jesus, same spirit, same righteousness, same table.

Those things have been removed. The woke gospel re-institutes the divisions that were broken down at the cross. Does so in a very America-centric way. I don't understand why the American experience of this translates elsewhere.

And the very fact that it does shows you that it's not really the experience of slavery in the United States. I mean, how do you bring this woke message to Western Africa, where it's well known that it was black people who sold black people into slavery back then?

How does the message of white privilege work there? How does it work in North Africa, where whites were sold into slavery by Barbary pirates, where you have the whole Arab context enslaving both whites and blacks at the same time?

How does any of this translate? That's why it's the woke gospel, but it's not the biblical gospel, because the biblical gospel transcends all that stuff. The biblical gospel can go anywhere. It can go into any context.

And it can heal divisions in any situation where there has been horrific genocide in the past. Just think of the genocides just over the past 200 years in Eastern Europe. The gospel can bring German and Jewish believers together.

Read the works of Corrie Ten Boom. Read the stories she's told of prison guards who, hearing her story, have been wonderfully converted and brought into the closest Christian fellowship with people they used to guard under the Nazi regime.

This is the power of the gospel, but it's not the power of the woke gospel, since the woke gospel requires the maintenance of these distinctions and says that they are good. When Thabiti Anyabwili, on the last program, we read his own words.

He will take his ethnic identification over his Christian identification for the purposes of survival. For the purposes of survival, what do you do when you have this type of message exploding onto the scene?

And obviously, the vast majority of churches are not prepared to provide an answer, and most are just simply going, oh man, we've got to go with this. Tomorrow night, is it tonight or tomorrow night? I think it's tomorrow night.

TGC, Together for the Gospel. No, the Gospel Coalition. Would you stop with the three letters? It's like trying to remember Hebrew triliteral roots. The Gospel Coalition is going to have a live online lament for racial, what's it called?

Lament for Racial Equality? Is that what it's being called? Something along those lines. Lament for Racial Justice, is that what it's called? Yeah, Night of Lament for Racial Justice. Yeah, tomorrow night.

Look, if TGC's doing that, how can anyone stand up and say, whoa, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, no, we're not going there, because racial justice is a term that's been hijacked by the society, filled with Neo-Marxist meanings, not even Neo-Marxist, just full-on Marxist meanings, and has no place in the world.

There's lots of people in TGC. Well, there may be, but whosoever is in charge is plainly woke, fully woke. And once I start seeing some of the top TGC guys responding and saying that what other TGC guys are doing is replacing the message of redemption with a message of constant penance, okay, then I'll believe the, well, we have lots different viewpoints expressed in the TGC thing.

Right now, I'm only hearing one. I'm only hearing one. And so, this is what we're facing, and it's an Americanization. It eviscerates the very heart of what would be the message that could actually bring healing.

As we said in the last program, unless you have a Christian worldview, the sentence Black Lives Matter does not make any sense. And we must understand, I'll repeat this again because I keep seeing it, we must understand that the people promoting division so as to bring about fundamental change, that is, bring about a socialist utopia, that's what their Marxist goals are, are playing on that line.

When pushback comes, they say, oh, you don't believe Black Lives Matter, rather than, oh, you don't support the Marxist organization that's funneling money during election year to all the leftists it can possibly fund.

And yes, I'm very glad that this morning I wake up and here's video all over the place, all over social media of the co-founders, there are three founders, but two of the three founders of Black Lives Matter saying, well, first they said we're community organizers.

That sounds familiar. Who else? Who's the most famous community organizer of all time? Oh, Barack Hussein Obama. He was community organizer. I always wondered exactly what that was as a qualification, community organizer.

But here's a woman saying, community organizer, and I'm a Marxist. I am a Marxist. Yeah, Jeff will listen to the dividing line and see that, Jeff, I can't answer phone calls while I am live on the air.

So anyway, but she said she is a trained Marxist, which was very good for me, because as I said on Twitter, we would not want to have untrained Marxists rampaging through the streets. We want the trained ones rather than the untrained ones, because I guess the training helps you to burn the right buildings in the right way.

I don't know. I'm not exactly sure how that works, but yeah, they're admitting they're trained Marxists, trained Marxists. That's Black Lives Matter. Well, we knew that from what they believe. The language is clear and plain.

It gives them away. But here you have Marxists, and now you have in the church. Now, sadly, I hate to tell you this, but the history of the past century demonstrates that whenever Marxists moved in a nation, they were always willing religious people to work with them until they had power, then they got rid of them.

It's always, it's literally the useful, in fact, that's where the term came from, useful idiots. They buy the story that this is about equality, equity, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then once the revolution has taken place, and now it's time for the socialist utopia.

Well, there is no socialist utopia, because socialism does not have a understanding of the nature of man and the nature of sin. And therefore, there can't be a socialist utopia. And so you just move right on in to communism, because that's, it's the same thing.

One just has more guns than the other. One you vote in, the other one, you got to shoot your way out of either one of them, but one you vote in, the other one normally comes in with guns. And that's how it works.

Anyway, so we, you always had religious organizations that in their naivete would cooperate with such things and then get destroyed like everybody else. And that's what we see today. That's happening right in front of us.

Here we are again. And it does make you want to pull your hair out. It does make you want to scream because you know history. And you know what the end result of this could possibly be unless God shows some mercy.

I mean, and that mercy, the only mercy that's going to save here is all out revival. I like to use the term revival. We use the term revival only within the church. People schedule revivals as if you can schedule something like that.

We're talking Reformation. We're talking a complete change of the spiritual nature of the American people. We're talking an outpouring of the Spirit of God that would be absolutely unprecedented since the early church.

It really would. That's what's needed in this situation. God can do it. The question is, what are his purposes? And of course, the question for all of us is, how do we remain faithful in the midst of whatever it is he calls us to face?