Consider Revival V: Seeking Revival Practically

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snyder and with me again is Steve Crampton and we are looking at the theme of revival, those extraordinary seasons where God seems to draw near in an unusual manner and then both the intimacy that the believer enjoys with our God and the effective impact of his labor, you know, really are raised to a level that we would feel is extraordinary.

So we've been looking at this theme and this is our fifth episode. We had intended a couple but it's kind of lengthened and what we want to do today is we want to look again at the account of the ministers in Scotland in 1651 when they gathered together to consider the reasons or the causes of God's displeasure with their land.

Why was he judging Scotland? And the answer they came up with was the sin of the land. Strangely for us today, their next choice, their next thought was, but it's not the culture out there that rejects God that is first to be dealt with, it's the church.

And in dealing with the church, it's the ministers. And so the ministers themselves spent many days in this conference together considering their sins and as Steve mentioned in our previous episode, how deep, how wonderfully penetrating.

This is the opposite of kind of just a quick list of well yeah, well we haven't been perfect. This is quite a soul-searching list and we are only going to be able to pull out a couple and so we're going to get to that today.

And so this is taken from their statement in 1653 when they actually published their document, The Sins of the Ministry of Scotland, where they said they wanted it to be clear, they wanted to justify God's judgment of Scotland, that he was right in how he was treating them, and they wanted it to be clear how deep our hand is in the transgression of the land, which is quite really just quite a wonderful picture of a truly godly leader.

And as we mentioned last time, application far beyond just ministers. Anyone who has spiritual influence, who has been trusted with the Lord to influence younger believers, to teach in Sunday school, to teach in Christian schools, homeschool your own children, dads and moms, husbands, just so many applications.

Well Steve, why don't you kick us off with one that you felt was particularly helpful?

Lightness and Profanity in Conversation

I would love to. One of the first ones, I think this actually may be the very first one, lightness and profanity in conversation. And I think use of the term profanity there is not the way we would tend to think of it today, it's not cursing, it is the lack of respect for the sacred, it's the worldly.

And they echo this in a couple of others, there's one a little further down, fruitless conversing ordinarily with others for the worse rather than for the better. And one of the things that struck me about this John is, I mean I'm a lawyer, I deal in words, and you know, we live in a day when free speech really isn't very free in our nation, and to raise the topic of religion is a very controversial thing in a lot of contexts.

In fact, it can get you into a lawsuit in the context of the employment setting, for example, that sort of thing. And so I think we live in a time, certainly I feel it pretty keenly, that we're always kind of self-censoring our speech.

You go on an airplane or you're just engaging in conversation with a stranger for the first time, and the temptation is to ratchet everything down to the lamest level, the banal. You can talk sports, maybe, if you don't have a rabbit fan, but to talk religion, and sometimes even with our brothers and sisters in the church, it's not an easy thing to take seriously that our words are deeply impactful, whether for good or for evil, for really, as this one says, conversing ordinarily with others for the worse rather than the better, and to really give thought to what we say to one another in the limited time that we have with one another, and what a profound difference it can make in the spiritual life of an entire nation, ultimately.

Yeah, we, at the church where we attend, we have lunch every Sunday, and that's always a concern. You know, do we use this time of just friendship? Yeah. Do we use it in a way that's beneficial? You know, you want to avoid that kind of falsely religious where you put on a mask, and everything you say is kind of King James Version, you know, and that's not helpful, but that kind of walk with the Lord, and then the carefulness that you mentioned on top of that, because it doesn't just naturally happen, you know, effortlessly, even when we walk with the Lord, though we do want to talk about the Lord when we walk with the Lord, but even then, there is care required, so that how I help, how I speak to the person across the table from me, I am thinking, what would really.

Be lastingly beneficial, and not just casual? As Proverbs puts it, a word fitly spoken is really a special thing, and it requires, like you say, it's just not natural, requires forethought, requires sensitivity and insight, often given by the Holy Spirit Himself, to where that person is, what kind of struggles they're dealing with, and the like.

So just to take our words seriously, that this is a tremendous gift we've been given, but a great responsibility, just to be able to converse with one another as our daily walk transpires.

Yeah, I mean, you can apply it, you know, at the workplace, if you are the Christian there, to be prayerfully anticipating, looking for the openings where the emptiness of life is expressed by, you know, your co-worker, and you have a.

Chance to say something about Christ. Richard Owen Roberts shared with us some years ago when he was at the church that whenever he boarded a plane, he would pray about the person he was going to be sitting next to, and for an opportunity to speak words that would have a lasting effect to that person.

I've employed that often, but I can't say every time I've boarded a plane. It's a.

Sobering thought, too. Yeah, and again, and then with the Christian, not just at church. I mean, oftentimes how we spend time with each other at Christ Church in New Albany is having folks over for supper, and so you have a couple families from the church over, and you're able, you have an opportunity just to be friendly, or you have an opportunity to be friendly, but also to be friendly in a way that the focus is directed toward eternal things, and that, I find, that really does take some work.

A lot of times my wife will say to me, let's make sure we're careful that this is a really beneficial time with the people, because I spent 10 hours getting ready for it, and if we're just gonna, you know, goof off, which I'm often guilty of, then, like, well, why did we invite people over?

You know, so it does take some care, and they saw this as a genuine sin. That there was something wrong in my heart that led me not to be careful. Let me give you the first that I chose. Not having a practical knowledge and experience of the mystery of the gospel in themselves before they taught others.

Experiential Knowledge of the Gospel Before Teaching Others

Certainly applicable to parents or to church leaders. So, in modern language, not really knowing the transforming power of the gospel, but you're willing to talk about religion to other people, and that is not an okay thing.

Actually, that is a sinful thing. Historically, in the 17th century with Puritanism, the Puritans warned ministers that just because they lived moral lives and had right doctrine, or studied their Bibles, and were willing to kind of devote themselves to the ministry of Christianity, that that was not evidence that they were really born again.

Which was a shocking thing to say to them. Yeah, which was quite offensive. You know, the ministers of the day would say, look, my life is good, my doctrine is good, and I work hard for the church. What more do you expect?

And they would say, you must be born again, and that was just so offensive. In the 18th century, more so, as Whitfield and others here in America, the Tenet brothers in particular, really hammered home the theme of an unregenerate or a non-born-again leadership of the church.

That many ministers knew nothing more of conversion, as David Brainerd said, who became a missionary to the Indians, than that chair over there, which got him kicked out of college. So it's not a good thing to do, to say that about your religious professor.

But today I think we could say it this way, just because you are a teacher or a pastor does not mean that you know experientially the God of.

The Bible. And I would add that even if you have been genuinely converted, sometimes the temptation is to speak of things about Christ that you haven't personally experienced. So in the book, Words to Winners of Souls, Bonnard comes back and says later, speaking about these confessions, speaking of Christ more by hearsay than from knowledge and experience.

I mean, I think we have to really guard against those things, that temptation to speak churchy talk, rather than to genuinely know it and speak from your own heart.

And experience. Yeah, and we're not saying by that, and they weren't either, that the truths of Scripture aren't true unless I've experienced them. They are objectively true, even if a donkey says them.

But what is the pattern of our Lord? When He was talking with the Jews, He pointed out the distinct difference between their disciples and His disciples. We speak what we know. We tell you of a meal that we have eaten.

It is a dishonoring thing to the living God for us to accept a surface knowledge, like you said, hearsay, kind of just, well, I read a great commentary here, or I heard a preacher say this, but you have not done the hard work of bringing those truths down into your own life.

So that does ultimately dishonor the Lord, and.

They saw it as a sin. Steve, give us another one. Not studying self-denial, nor resolving to take up the cross of Christ. For me, this one really encompasses all kinds of additional ones. For instance, there's one exceeding great selfishness in all that we do, acting from ourselves, for ourselves, to ourselves.

We find ourselves, as we're taping this in kind of the Christmas season, and I don't know about you, but when I'm shopping online for gifts for my family, I'm often diverted to look at things, well, you know, I might need to look at this.

Particular object, too. I've never done that, Steve. Never bought a thing for myself. But, you know, the.

Whole idea that we are called as believers to take up that cross to a self-denial kind of life as our Savior lived, and yet, again, we live in a world and in America with all our abundance where it's so easy to just sort of get complacent and focused on where we are and sort of live on that pillowed life rather than really seeking to serve others and deny ourselves.

Seems to me that, as I say, it's kind of an umbrella sort of attitudinal thing, ultimately, that probably impacts many of these other specific confessions. But another one later on in that list that is very similar for me, finding of our own pleasure when the Lord calls for our humiliation.

And again, those old writers, that idea of humiliation, but I see that as basically being another kind of a synonym for the self-denial, that we need to put others first, and that is ultimately the heaven-mindedness, and ultimately, I think there's a footnote that Banar refers to where it's spiritual-mindedness that is ultimately at the core of our Christian life and what we often kind of fail to live up to.

Another one that I noted was, they said, the sin of coming to our Bibles and studying them, not for our own soul first, but using it, I would say in modern language, as source material for our task. So, Sunday school teacher, Sunday morning, you know, it's Saturday evening, you think, I got to get ready for Sunday school, and so you're kind of driven by a responsibility to the Scripture.

It is easy when we handle the Word of God somewhat professionally, okay, even if you're not a minister. Like, think of a parent, if you're doing, you know, family worship, like, well, I've got to have something to say.

You know, it's a little embarrassing to say to your kids, I got nothing to say, guys, nothing at all. Like, I don't even know where I would read from today. You cannot imagine a minister very often coming to a group of people on Sunday morning saying, well, you gave me a salary so I could devote myself to the study of Scripture and to prayer and things like that, and, well, I just don't have anything worth saying, you know.

I mean, you might once or twice get away with that, but no matter how kind your congregation, you'd probably be given another job, you know. You can go work somewhere else. You're obviously not cut out for this.

Charles Spurgeon in the 1800s said it was a terrible thing, a terrible picture of our soul when the sermon drives us to the Bible. The pulpit drives me to the Bible, rather than the pulpit, rather than the Bible, sorry, driving me to my pulpit.

So let's apply that to just normal life. When my own long soak in the Word drives me to talk to people at work and to people at church and to the kids in my Sunday school class, to the children in my family about Christ, that's the healthy pattern.

But when I know someone's expecting me to have something to say about Jesus, and so I hurry up and brush off my Bible, then that's a problem, and these men saw that as a sinful approach to the Word of God.

And may I say, too, that that whole idea of just sort of being in the Word and not just leaving it after your morning devotional, but carrying it with you, and again, kind of it being the focus of your day is the ultimate challenge here, isn't it?

Studying the Bible for the Soul First

I want to take one also from Bonarza. He played off of these from the 1651 list and sort of added some of his own. And in this book, he says, we have been cold, meaning love is wanting. I'm going to quote from him here.

Love is wanting, deep love, love strong as death, love such as made Jeremiah weep in secret places for the pride of Israel. And Paul speaks even weeping of the enemies of the cross of Christ. When we go about our lives in the coldness, and again, I'm gonna say self-centered sort of way, that people don't have to hear our words to sense that we don't really care for them.

It sort of destroys all witness, doesn't it? And I mean, it's easy to fall into that kind of sentimentalism that says, well, God is love, and all we need to do is love. But there's a lot of truth to that.

If what we're doing is not with love, as Paul says, are we not just like a tinkling cymbal? I mean, we're empty. We're completely devoid of the power of the Holy Spirit. Yeah, I think of the loveless.

Truth brought by a loveless life, which we would all, you know, we would all say, but that has been me. And it's not just it has been me, you know, 40 years ago, you know. Has it been me this month? Have I become tired?

Have I become frustrated? You know, do I shoot truth at someone and say, look, it's truth. So you just take it, and I don't have to do the hard work of humbling myself and showing love. But I think of that passage that you mentioned with Paul and the cymbals.

Think of a clanging cymbal that a kid gets. Like, let's say someone hates you and buys your kid's cymbals for Christmas. Yes. I mean, the big ones, you know. Can you imagine that you're in the living room or you're in the kitchen talking with your wife, and the kid comes up for the hundredth time.

Bang! Right behind you. Chang! And you just think, it is so, you know, grating to hear that. It's grating to hear the sweetest, kindest truths from our Creator to His enemies, handed to them by an unloving person.

Yes. You know, there's just something jarring about that. One that I think goes along with that is, he says, treating those who are different than me in theological views. So we would say, how we treat those that we feel are wrong, spiritually, theologically.

And let me give you kind of a summary of what he says. Not praying for men of contrary judgment, who have different views, but using reservedness and distance from them, which you mentioned. So, all right, I'm not, I don't say a lot of nasty things about them, perhaps, but I just let it be known by the lack of giving myself to them, that I got, you know, I got no use for you.

So, then he goes on, being more ready to speak of them than to them. So, you've got problems, but I don't want to talk to you about it. I'll talk to everybody else. Yes. Or, to God for them. Prayer. So, good test for us.

Do I speak, any person that I'm disagreeing with, do I speak more about them to people than I speak to them, or to God for them? Very simple test. Not weighed with the failings and miscarriages of others, not weighed down with their failings, but rather taking advantage thereof for justifying ourselves.

In other words, I told you I was a good, you know, orthodox, solid Christian, and the evidence is, Joe over here is not, you know, and look how good I am compared to Joe. Yeah. Talking of them and sporting at their faults, rather than compassionating, rather than being caught up with a real compassion for them.

And this goes with that lack of love. If you have a child in your home that is rebelling and breaking your heart, you don't mock them to your friends. Right. You know, you hardly even want to talk about it because it's just so sad.

You know, you can't sleep easily through the night, you've been up crying out to the Lord, things don't seem to be getting any better. But really, you know, them returning to the Lord, you know, it's so important to you, you wouldn't think of mocking them to others.

But that's because of love. But if another person is drifting from the Lord that's not in your home, and that's a bit of a, maybe a bit of a hard person to like, and you see them, you know, we can think of maybe people on the national scene going into heresy.

And we didn't like them in the first place. It is so easy to mock them to other people for their heresy because you do not love them. Yes. It's not because we love truth so much that we mock heretics, it's because we don't know, like you mentioned, we don't have the heart of Christ or of Paul, both of whom broke their hearts over the unbelieving Jews.

Yes. I think of.

Prominent Christian leaders who have fallen recently, and how easy it is to, like you say, kind of point fingers and maybe find something that you were critical of to begin with in their ministries, and to just sort of almost delight in their falling.

And when you consider the world's view of the church and how grievous that is for the Holy Spirit to see those occasions for the mocking of the church generally, not to mention the tragedy and the pain and suffering of immediate family members, the folks that were involved in that ministry, and so on and so on.

It really is just like night and day for me to think of those different perspectives, and frankly very convicting. Well, give us another one, Steve. Well, one that everyone would probably think would be an obvious one is prayer.

Prayer in Secret

The ministers put it, seldom in secret prayer with God. And I think universally we could all say prayer is a very difficult thing. I would throw in another one of those in our day and age. As busy as we are, as noisy as we are, it becomes more and more precious to me, at least, to find that quiet place and quiet moment to get with God, as he says, in secret prayer.

Ben-Ar puts it like this, Why is there so much speaking, yet so little prayer? Why is there so much running to and fro, yet so little prayer? Why so many meetings with our fellow men,.

Yet so few meetings with God? Yeah, and if you think that Andrew Ben-Ar, or this is Horatious Ben-Ar, if you think that Horatious is just talking, you can read something of the lives of the Ben-Ar boys.

They are particularly distinguished by prayer. Andrew Ben-Ar's diary reads like a prayer journal. It's like a book on how to pray. It's just the most extraordinary diary for that. Well, my last one is where they talk about the sin, and I'm gonna put it in our language, the sin of allowing a shallow form of repentance to serve for the real thing.

Shallow Repentance and Self-Deception

This is how they say it. Not given to reflect upon our own ways, nor allowing conviction to have a thorough work upon us. So, two things they start off. I just don't really give time to thinking about how I'm living out the Christian life.

You know, I skim along the surface. Second, I do not, when I do feel conviction in a sermon, or in a book, or a quiet time, I do not allow that conviction to work thoroughly through every aspect. So, I'm gonna stop there for a second.

Steve, I have found that as I grow older, I can, you know, you do find yourself, if you're not careful, you can become kind of hardened to religious truth. You think, well, I've heard it a thousand times, or I've said it a thousand times.

But I do find that by the grace of God, my heart is still able to be tender toward God, and I hear these things, and I think, it's true, God. It's me. But here's what I have found very difficult. I have found it very difficult a week later, even when I'm focusing on it, to be able to give evidence of one single thing I've done differently after conviction.

Now, I've thought about it, I've talked to God about it, but if you say, okay, but okay, I understand that, and I'm not saying you're disingenuous, but can you tell me one habit that's been changed? One thing that's added to your life?

One thing that's removed from your life? It seems to me like it would be easier to roll a giant boulder up a hill than to get John Snyder to make a concrete change. Now, it does happen, but it's never without real kind of soul-searching and shame, and saying, John, you did it again.

You appreciated the sermon, you loved the book, you talked to someone about the chapter, and next week you haven't altered anything. You have lived in a land of good intentions. They go on to say this.

It says, deceiving ourselves, how? By resting upon absence from and abhorrence of evils from the light of a natural conscience, and looking upon the same as an evidence of a real change of state and nature.

In other words, my natural conscience, you know, I hear someone talking about, oh, this is so bad, people are acting like this, and you think, well, I feel fine about that. I'm not bothered at all because I'm not that kind of person, and you think that just because your conscience isn't bothered, without seriously examining and praying about the matter, you think you're sinless.

Yeah. And you rest in that false sense of righteousness, self-deceived. So I find that very easy to do as I hear other people mention, like, or you hear sins of our culture mentioned. I think, well, I'm not doing it, and so I'm just fine.

So a very easy way to deceive ourselves. Well, we've only given you a few of the many sins that the ministers pointed out, and hopefully we've tried to apply them in a way that is, you see, that's universal.

Also, this little book, Words to Winners of Souls by Horatius Benar, published by PNR Publishing. Great little book. Many chapters that are very convicting, but also some chapters that are really hope-filled.

Yes. Is there any hope for a person entrusted with the care of other souls when I see myself, you know, guilty in every chapter? I mean, every time I read this book, you know, I do it with a notebook, and I try to read through it about once a year.

I don't always do that, but when I read through it, I write down, okay, well, yeah, that needs to change that, and I feel like I should just say, well, okay, you know, 2021, everything needs to change.

But it's not a book that produces despair, because it does look at how Christ is the hope of the broken-hearted spiritual leader, and so if you haven't gotten that book, we'll put a link to that where you can find that in the show notes.

Well, five weeks we've been looking at the theme of the extraordinary presence of the Lord, and what response would be appropriate from any believer who longs to know a greater degree of God's nearness and work in our lives, through our lives, and the appropriate response is that tender hearted repentance, and that yearning that just won't let you—how should we say it—it just doesn't let you go back to life as usual, you know.

Well, we hope that this has been beneficial, and we'll see you next week.