The Church Needs To Repent

The Church's Accountability Before God

Well, I've been listening to Dan this morning, and in 1992, in my denomination, I was tasked with writing a solemn assembly manual for my denomination. And I found myself chatting with people, particularly in the Southern Baptist tradition, who had been for almost five years dancing with this idea that when nations sin, they need to be accountable to God.

And so, sadly, most of us went through a solemn assembly phase. We tried solemn assembly as a kind of a testing taste, or a tasting test. We sampled it, and then we said, well, that was interesting. And for a large part, we put it away.

We forget that God keeps a record of our sins. Not just personal sins, but family sins, and city sins, and nation sins. There is in Scripture, and you'll hear me mention this perhaps again, what is called the brim of iniquity.

That's the point at which the cup of iniquity, the record of sins in a particular entity overflows. And when it reaches that point of overflow, God meets out judgment. There are five things that, in Scripture, cause God to wash his hands and walk away from a culture.

Five National Sins That Bring Judgment

And these five things are the shedding of innocent blood. We immediately think about 60 million plus abortions, but we have 16 ,000 to 17 ,000 murders every year, many of which are not solved. Bloodshed has become a common thing.

In the Old Testament, when a body was found near a village, the elders of the village, of the two nearest villages, gathered. And they gathered by a stream in an unplowed field, and they offered a sacrifice.

And they asked God to reveal the sin, their culpability, if there was culpability, and then forgive them. There is a church in, I think it's Durham, that sends a group to pray for every homicide in the city.

They go to the site, they pour out wine, and they pour out juice, and they pour out oil. And they weep over the casual violence that has cost another life. They will reach out to the family, not only the victim, but the perpetrator.

And they will weep with them. And then at the beginning of their service, they have a lament. Laments constitute 40 of the Psalms, but we don't lament. We have a high level of celebration narrative in our worship.

It's everybody on your feet, put your hands together for Jesus. We act as if the world around us isn't falling apart, and the nation isn't in sin. We haven't made a place to weep over our sins. I grew up, I'm old now, and I remember you never went to church unless you responded to the word of God in repentance.

You had singing, some kind of congregational worship, you had word engagement, but then you also had altar time. And nobody was allowed to leave unless they had engaged God and dealt with sin in their life.

That's gone away. We set this kind of assumption that God kind of automatically takes care of our sins. Whenever a culture fails to reckon with growing levels of sin and transgression against the law of God, that accumulates.

Number one, when innocent blood is shed. Number two, when the dead are treated with disrespect, they're left. Even the despised criminal in the Old Testament was to be given a burial, the sacredness of the body.

And that has implications far beyond how we treat the dead and how we respond in some kind of ceremony. I think the number is approaching now 40 of people in America who do not want a sacred funeral, who do not want a Christian funeral, who are opting either for no funeral at all.

Or are not a preacher who is engaged to talk to their relatives about getting right with God and about the finality of death. How we respond to death as a culture and how we treat the sacredness of life and the sacredness of a life.

Number three is the breakdown of the family through the proliferation of cheap divorce. Number four is sexual deviation, particularly homosexuality. The whole issue of sexual identity and that really rises out of and is related to some extent.

Number five, the proliferation of idolatry, false worship centers and sites, paganism with its priest. The only response to these kinds of egregious sins was prayer, was a solemn assembly in which a family or a church or a city gathered and they repented before God.

The Church's Corporate Repentance

You remember in the seven letters of Jesus, his epistles to the churches in the Revelation chapter two and three. Two are commended, five are called to repentance. But in those five that are called to repentance, they're good people, they're godly people, they're righteous people, they're people who are commended.

But the church itself is still under the conviction of God because of things that are happening in that congregation. You can be in a relatively good church that still needs to repent. The only way that church gets right with God is not just the sole condition of its members, but that the church itself as an assembly has a solemn moment and comes together and seeks God and repents.

We have to, in repentance, acknowledge the sin and then in redirection, turn away from it. If we don't redirect, then repentance is superficial, it's hypocritical at best. And so there is repentance, godly sorrow, but it's godly sorrow that brings redirection in our lives.

These five things that I mentioned, five egregious sins, the shedding of innocent blood, the lack of respect for life itself, the breakdown of the family, sexual deviation, and idolatry. When they reach a certain level, here's what God does.

He packs up his glory and he leaves. I know I'll repeat this, but let me just say it to you again. In Romans chapter 1, you have in verse 12, this concept that the wrath of God is revealed. And you have the recognition that we knew truth, but we turned away from that truth.

We denied the creator his rightful place and we worshiped the creature more than the creator. Rather than realizing our sacredness that we were created in the image of God, made out of dust, but sprinkled with the glory of God and in-breathed with his presence, elevated.

We may be made from dust, but we identify more with God than the world. We're set apart under him. We're created special, but this has been rendered by evolution, this connection, this concept. And now we identify with creation.

And rather than extolling God for all of his greatness and glory, we come to identify as we do. And I know that this sounds a bit over the top, but we identify even as cities with animals through our sports teams, with the spirit of the lion, or the panther, or this or that, or some other thing.

We have not come as cities to be bound together around God and his values. We've come to be bound together around other things. When this kind of thing happens, when a culture turns away from God, what happens is God packs up his glory and leaves.

He gives them over, Romans 1. Three times it's mentioned. It's actually a legal concept. It's as if God in heaven in his courtroom is filing an injunction against the people. And he's saying, now stop, stop this behavior.

But each time we violate the barricade, we violate the warning, we go further and further into the depths of degradation until finally at the end of Romans 1, God washes his hands. And he says, okay, this is the greatest judgment of all is to leave us to the consequences of our own behavior so that God is no longer speaking.

He's no longer intervening. I want us just to stop in my section here and pray. I want us to pray. And if you'll let me just pray with open eyes. Father, I just pray that you will not abandon America because we've run through every one of these three barricades in Romans 1.

With the new Supreme Court rulings on sexual identity, we violated all of them. And we have embraced the most egregious kind of moral degeneration as a norm. I'm asking you don't leave us. I'm asking you don't abandon us to our own consequences.

I'm asking you to have mercy on us. I'm asking you for the sake of your own purposes, your own will, the purpose for which you raised up this nation, as John Adams said, to fulfill the Great Commission.

I'm asking you for the sake of your own purposes to intervene. I'm asking you, Lord, to somehow bring us to our senses regarding abortion and the shedding of innocent blood. The kids who know that their sibling died at the hands of an abortionist in an abortion clinic.

God, would you turn their hearts of these millennials of Gen Z back to you and say, not on my watch, not with my kids. I'm just praying, oh God, that you would wake us up to the violence, to the senseless killing, more than 15 ,000, approaching 17 ,000 in some years, senseless homicides and murders in the nation.

Would you have mercy on us, oh God? Would you intervene, God? The thing that comes back, the fountainhead of it all, the intersection for all of this is fatherlessness. It's the breakdown of the family.

It goes back to the 1962 or thereabouts, a Supreme Court ruling on divorce. When the court said unwisely, we will no longer invest our time in trying to keep families together. We will no longer use the legal force of the nation to hold to family integrity.

And we shifted without even realizing it to a culture that was bound together by healthy families, where there was a covenant among people, husbands and wives and children and grandchildren. That family unit, we shifted to individualism and now to hyper individualism.

We changed with that court ruling the whole basis on which we organize our culture. We were organized as families, healthy families, knit together, committed families who worked out their problems together and stayed together.

And moving from that, we moved to a culture of individualism and now hyper individualism. The thing that's killing us is families. And I'll come back to this, particularly tomorrow in my section. And I'll talk about the fact that no spiritual renewal is complete unless it rebirths the family altar, unless it brings us back to husbands and wives praying together and children and grandchildren connected together.

Unless you bring faith home and unless that faith has transformational impact, it will not sustain any kind. You can't do at church, you can't substitute at church what's not happening in the home. And so God, we just repent over the direction of our nation.

Restoring Faith in the Home

We repent over the fact that we have gone our separate ways. We repent over prayerless families. We repent over the discomfort that keeps us from praying together as a husband and wife. From opening a Bible, we repent over homes where we grab our meals and go in this direction and that direction and eat on the run and the family never comes together.

There's no regular moment in which the family is constituted and sits together. And there's no moment in which the scripture is open and we hear it read and we see a father weep and we see a mother share her concern for us.

We don't have as our Jewish friends have a Sabbath where we light the candles and meet together over a meal and experience something of honoring God in that moment and keeping our faith alive in the home.

God, we repent. We repent over the absence of faith in our home, over going to church and hoping that a pastor has fire in his belly because we don't. And we grab a little bit and we enjoy the singing, but we're unmoved.

50 of the people in America, according to the MOVE study, 2 ,000 congregations across seven denominations, 50 do not even feel close to God. 50 have a brushing encounter with his presence at church.

But other than that, they call themselves Christians, but they're not walking in a dedicated consecrated way. Only 25%, only one in four of the people who go to church, and that's now only 16, 17 in America, the population, 82, 83 of the population is not in church on any given Sunday.

And if you stretch that out over eight Sundays, it's only about 23 to 25%. We are a nation that in this generation has turned away from God. And we've turned away from God to our idols, to the things that we love.

We may not have wooden idols. We may not have gold and silver plated idols, but we have idols. We have things that we value. It may be our job. It may be our money. It may be our name. It may be our football team or our NASCAR driver or something else.

We have idols. Idols are simply the pleasure points of our life or the power points of our life or the focus and purpose points of our life that are other than God. They've not been sanctified. They've not been brought into the kingdom of God.

They've not been subordinated. They may be fine. They may be fine as casual concerns in our life, but they cannot occupy the central place of our life that belongs to Christ. Only 25 of people who attend church on Sunday are living anything similar to a Christ-centered life.

God, we repent. We repent of things that cause you to pack up your glory and leave. Sin at the level of abomination. Five things that are mentioned in scripture. The shedding of innocent blood. The lack of respect for life.

And the suicide culture is a part of that. The breakdown of the family. Sexual deviation. Idolatry. If you have anything going on in your life that's even close to this kind of thing or in your family, I just want to give you a minute to repent.

I just want to give you a minute to ask God, show me this. God, if there's been an abortion in our families, we repent. We have in our old yard out here a little flower garden. Bricks. They were memorial bricks that were a part of a church that I pastored for a while.

And we had bought a brick, a memorial brick. And one was my mother and one was my wife's mother. And other members of the family that had passed on. And then there's one to a baby we lost. Because I'll never forget somebody saying to me one time, tears streaming down her face.

She said, God never forgets life. And even that child is sacred to him. I had never, never thought about it in that kind of very personal, poignant way. The other day I was out doing some weeding and I ran across that.

And I got to thinking about what would that boy or girl, what would be the effect of that child? You may have lost a child. You may have lost a spouse. You know the poignancy, the sacredness of life. You may be estranged from a family member.

And the Lord may be saying to you, I want you to heal that relationship. You may have things in your life that mean far too much to you. And I tell you, if there's anything God's saying to us in this season, it's to get our priorities right.

Even church can become a form of idolatry. And we can substitute the church for Christ. Father, if there's any of these things that we have become partisan to, I pray reveal them to us and help us to repent of them and deal with them in our lives.

Our lack of respect for the sacredness of life. The integrity of our families. Our sense of identity and God's right as creator, as the sovereign God to make us like we are. And for us to be okay with that and to be fine with that.

All of these five things are things that we've struggled with as a nation. I don't think we're at the point where God has just washed his hands and walked away. But I do think we're on the warning track of judgment.

And we've had 9 -1 -1. And we've had the banking, housing bubble crisis. And now we have this global pandemic. And we don't hear God in this. God is speaking to us about this. He's speaking to us in the context of this.

He's telling us that we're not as fortified as we think we are. 9 -1 -1. He's telling us we can't put our faith in money. We can't be so driven by that, the banking crisis. And he's telling us that there are invisible enemies that can stalk us and find us.

And medicine doesn't have a cure. We may surpass that 60 ,000 death in America, God forbid. There are places where this is just beginning to break out in South America and Africa. God's talking to us.

And God gave them over. And God gave them over. And God gave them over. And at some point, God either brings judgment of a severe kind that impacts the nation and causes it to have to reconstitute on another basis.

We're one of a handful of nations whose constitution has lasted more than 100 years. France has gone through seven new constitutions. The stability of this nation is extraordinary. But we're reaching a point where we're fragmenting and we're coming apart.

You see it amplified in Washington. You see it in every news conference. The only thing that can save us is a spiritual awakening that would come on the hills of a national solemn assembly. In this time, I have been doing a lot of thinking and a lot of writing.

And let me see if I can find the paper that I was looking for earlier. I've written a couple of white papers, and I hope, Dan, it's okay for me to mention them. One is The Coronavirus Isn't a Message from God.

The other one is The Coronavirus, a Window of Change, Seven Things We Must Consider. I've written on Passover as an opportunity for the family to recreate, begin to recreate a family altar. By the way, you don't have to feel bound to Passover season.

This might be a good thing for you to do anytime to start recovering the family altar. I have written most recently on the need for city elders in view of the overreach of the culture. There are problems in your city that can only be dealt with when unity forms around the idea of revival and spiritual renewal.

Seven Changes Required for Spiritual Renewal

This paper, Seven Things We Must Consider, I want to just take you through this. And just forgive me if I look at the paper here and not at the screen. Seven things, and I just want to stop and pray with each one of these.

Number one, my challenge to churches is that we cannot go on as we've gone before. If there's anything that God is saying to us, He's saying to us, you've got to change, and you've got to take an inventory of where you are.

So would you just pray with me right now? Father, I'm asking you, if you're a pastor, that you would give me the courage to know how to call my church to repentance and change. I want the first Sunday out to be different than any other time before.

I'm asking you for the message that I need to share with my people, even leading up to our first Sunday back. I'm asking you that we not go back to three songs and offering a special and a sermon. I'm asking you that we not get back into a rut.

We were in a rut. You've stirred us. You've called us. You're challenging us. I'm asking you, Father, to have mercy on us. Lord, here's three things that I'm saying to churches and pastors. Number one, I'm saying, when you come back from this, open your church.

Before Sunday, open your church. You can do this now. You can open your church to, in most places, less than 10 people in the sanctuary at any time. Put a throne chair where the pulpit normally stands, just to switch it up and let it represent God.

Drape some blue cloth over it, the glory of God. Some purple, the royalty of God. Some scarlet over it, the blood of Christ. Some white over it, a reminder, a call to holiness. Put worshipful music on and just let it play all day.

Put scriptures on the screen regarding the holiness of God, regarding the love of God, the goodness of God. It's the goodness of God that brings us to repentance and the sovereignty of God. Let people just sit for as long as they want in the presence of God, in the sanctuary.

Let them come and kneel at the altar. Let them get prostrate before God. If you need to limit it to 10 or families of 10, open your church before the first Sunday. Open it to people and encourage them.

Get right with God. Put the communion tray out. And if you need to have an elder there that stands watch over it, as many liturgical churches require, that's fine. The great camp meeting revivals of the early 1800s, the great service would be on Sunday, but the people would come in in wagons on Thursday and Friday and they would spend Saturday listening to preachers call for repentance.

And they would meet with pastors. They would meet with preachers and they would have those preachers pray with them about the sins in their lives. They did not want to receive communion before getting right with God.

Boy, we've gone away from this. We've forgotten the holiness of God, the sacredness of God. We've forgotten the wrath of God. We've forgotten the judgment of God. We taste the elements, the blood, the brokenness of the body of Christ with such a casual spirit about us.

This is what caused the second great awakening. It was this recognition that families needed to get right with God. It was the great camp meeting experiences of 10, 20, 30 ,000 people. Open your church.

Call for repentance. Call for a new reverence for the holiness of God, a recognition of the sovereignty of God and his right to intervene, even in judgment in cultures. And yet the goodness of God. Number two, gather your elders or your deacons or whatever you have and their spouses.

Because as you see in Ezra, and I'll go there tomorrow in my time, as you see in Ezra, it is not until because the priest had married pagan wives. It's not so stunning. The rulers had married pagan wives.

The husbands had said, son, I'm marrying this woman. She's not a woman of faith. But I hear I would recommend that you marry her daughter or whatever. I mean, she's extraordinary. The sin, it was not until the homes, it was not until the homes were recalibrated in holiness and righteousness that there was true revival.

And it never is. So you have to have elders or deacons or whatever you call them in your denominational or congregational structure. You have to have your leadership and their spouses. You need your staff and their spouses.

You need your prayer leadership team, not just intercessors, but a broader team than that. I don't know how many that will constitute for you. It probably in most cases will be on the lowest end, 12 to 15 on the high end, 40 to 50.

You may have to wait until you feel good about the whole social distancing thing. But I'm pleading with you to consider before your first Sunday that you call a leadership solemn assembly. Don't so much worry about a script.

Just have your people bring their Bibles. Don't do it in the sanctuary where they're lined up in rows, looking in the backs of women's head. Do it in the fellowship hall with carpet on the floor and chairs in a circle or layers or layers of circles.

Don't have an agenda. Don't have, if you do have it, write it in pencil. The whole purpose is to get together and read scripture to one another as the spirit would lead and pray over those scriptures and say to God, what are you saying to our congregation?

What are you saying to us? What are you saying to us? I could see extraordinary value if a congregation did this. And in the course of the first month back, if you had multiple congregational meetings of multiple leadership teams of congregations in cities, Baptist and Pentecostal, liturgical and non-liturgical, Calvinist and Armenian, come together, come together around the simple center of Christ and his supremacy and make your denominational theology secondary to that and come together around task theology, your obligation to engage the city with the gospel of Jesus Christ and see a great spiritual awakening in your city.

Two things. I'm going to mention a third. Number one, open your sanctuary and engage your people and encourage them. Drop in at your convenience. The church is open from whatever time in the morning to late at night.

Put the music on. Put scriptures on the screen. Put some prayer stations around. Put a throne chair up in front. And let's just remind ourselves of the sovereignty of God. Call a leadership assembly of your people, a kind of prayer summit before God from nine o 'clock in the morning to three o 'clock in the afternoon to four.

And just spend time praying. Say six hours of praying without an agenda. Yeah, it'll fly away. It'll absolutely fly away. If you give the Holy Spirit a chance to settle down on you, it will fly away. And I'll guarantee you, people will move from their chairs to their knees and some to their faces.

And people will begin to weep before God. And you'll hear brokenness. And this is what has to happen in our churches. Brokenness has to come back. Pray the scripture. Pray Isaiah 6. Pray John 15. I'm going to release a resource for this called Transformational Prayer Meetings.

And you can find it on my website, Project Pray, or my Facebook site or something like that, or I'll make it available through Dan. The third thing you want to do is you want to make that first service coming out different than services you've had in the past.

You want to rejoice. The joy of the Lord is our strength, Nehemiah said. We've got the rubble in the city, but the joy of the Lord is our strength. We feel conviction of sin, but the joy of the Lord is our strength.

You know, godly repentance is not groveling. It's this quickening by the spirit of this thing that's wrong in my life, coupled with the recognition of grace. And it's the recognition of grace that brings joy.

You want both. If you just have cheap grace, as Bonhoeffer called it, then you dismiss the depravity and the potential of sin to destroy your life, to eat away and corrode your life and your marriage.

You must take sin seriously, and you must repent, and you must be broken over your sin. But that brokenness, those tears are juxtaposed and conjoined to joy because of the grace of God. If my people who are called by my name will repent, humble themselves, turn from their wicked ways, seek my face, then I'll hear from heaven and I will forgive.

There's grace. There's grace. But it involves seeking not merely the hand of God to get us out of trouble, but the face of God to know him. It involves humility before him. It involves true change and the capacity of change that comes by grace.

It involves a turning away from sin and the redirection of our lives. Number one, here's what God said to me in the middle of this crisis. He said, you must repent. You must take a hard look at where you have been and the style of what you've been doing and the comfort and church as idolatry.

He said to me, he said to me, our worship must change. It must move from audience passive to a different level of worship. Worship, or the old Anglo-Saxon word, is really a lousy translation for proscunio, which means to kiss the hand or even the ground upon which God stands.

It's the idea of deference to a king, to the face of a king. But the word, the Greek word seemed too intense. So when the English Bibles were produced, they chose to translate and use an English word, worship, and not the literal meaning of the Greek idea of worship, bowing before, prostrating yourself before.

That just seemed too intense. Kissing the hand of, kissing the ground before God, that just was too intense. So we keep dumbing down worship. We keep alleviating it of reverence. We don't stand before God.

In fact, people choose to stand if they want to stand. You don't do that in the courtroom. But we don't, we lack reverence for God. Worship, or worth-ship for the old Anglo-Saxon word, is the idea of my values around what do my values revolve?

What is worth the most in my life? It's really an issue of value. It's not lifting your hands and praising God as Pentecostals do. It's not clapping your hands. It's not a response to the music. It's much, much, much, much deeper.

It's the evaluation around what does my life revolve? And what would I die for? And what do I live for? That's worship. A worship service is intended to recalibrate those values. A worship service is intended to examine those values.

It's intended to force me to take a look at what is the most important thing in my life. And if we're dying to get out of church to make sure that we get to a game somewhere, that's what's worth the most to us.

And these are the kind of things that are killing us in America because of our lack of true devotion, of true devotion to God. Here's the fourth thing that I think God spoke to me in this virus. He's calling pastors back to himself.

I think even pastors have fallen in love with the church. I'll never forget leading a prayer summit, and I did this in many, many cities, probably 150 of these, where pastors of a whole city would get on a bus and go out of town and pray together.

Sometimes it was a handful of pastors, 20, 25 pastors. Sometimes it was 60 to 70 pastors. And for three days, four days, they would spend time around a communion table, and they would pray, and they would bring their relationship back to God.

And I'll never forget a pastor praying one time, God, forgive me for adultery. Forgive me for the woman that I'm having an affair with. And he was talking about the church. He said, I'm having an affair with your church.

I've never forgotten it. I've never forgotten the depth of his conviction as he realized in that moment that the church had become, that preaching had become more important to him than Christ had become to him.

Peter, do you love me more than these? Do you love me? I'm calling you back to me. If there's anything I think God is doing in this crisis, it's that he's calling pastors back to a love relationship with him.

Pastors that are too busy to pray. Pastors that are on the run that don't have time for God. He's saying, I don't want you. I don't want you to be so caught up in the church that you are missing me. I remember a pastor saying, a pastor in a large church, a couple thousand.

And he said, every morning I was going to the hospital an hour away to be with somebody and pray with somebody. I prayed for people, but I didn't spend time in prayer myself. God is calling you as a pastor.

And as a member back to him, back to a relationship with him. He doesn't want us to center off the church. He wants us to center off him and a relationship with him. Here's the fifth thing that God spoke to me during this time.

We must again become missional. The church must not be about us. We don't even know the neighborhood around us. We don't even know the number of people who don't go to church. We don't even know the spiritual conditions, the broken walls of our city.

We don't even know those things. And the result is, the consequence is that we are not missional. The church is all about us and what it does for us. 60 to 70 of people look for a church that can minister to their needs.

It's become a service station for us, filled with children's programs and youth programs and singles programs and family programs and seniors programs. And all of those things are wonderful, but not one of those ministries is mentioned in the Bible.

Instead, it says the church should be a house of prayer. A house of prayer to the end that we evangelize the nations and we disciple those nations. The church must become missional again. And then number six, there has to be a shift in our prayer theology from self-interested prayer that's all about us and our needs.

I say to pastors all the time, and I know I'm misunderstood and you will misunderstand me again, perhaps, prayer requests in our church services are killing us. Five minutes of woe of one prayer request and one prayer request and a minute of prayer.

The Bible actually never tells us to bring our prayer. There's nothing wrong with praying for one another, but the Bible never tells us to bring our prayer requests to church so that other people can pray for us.

There's nothing wrong with that, but that's not the purpose. The purpose is that I go to God with my own needs. Because in that moment, God is wanting me to consult with him about the things that matter in my life and about the solutions that he might have for me and about the faith that I need and the strength that I need to get through that crisis.

Our prayer theology must shift. It must shift from prayer that seeks to get God to please us to the desire, Hebrews 11 and six, that we please him. It must shift from getting something from the hand of God to getting to seeing the face of God and knowing God.

It must shift from acquisition, what we get out of prayer, to what we give to God. I beseech you, therefore, brother, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies as a living sacrifice. It must shift from a transaction with God, my bringing faith to him in exchange for this thing that he gives to me, healing or a breakthrough or whatever else.

It must shift from actions with God to transformation. The great need is not that God changes things. The great need is that he changes me. And if I'll allow him to change me, he'll change everything else.

We need a radical shift in our prayer theology. We've defined prayer theology or prayer almost exclusively as asking things of God. I run a prayer line every Saturday night at nine o 'clock. It's called Saturday Night Fire and we're praying for awakening.

And every once in a while, I'll have somebody hears about this line and they'll come on and crash into the line and say, I'm only here for you to pray for me. And sometimes I'll pause and pray for them.

And sometimes I'll say, if you'll hang around at the end of the call, we'll pray for personal needs. But right now we're praying for a greater need, revival in the church and awakening in the culture.

I've got some people who promptly hang up. They have no time for that. All they need, all they want is for somebody to pray for their needs. We have to have a better prayer theology than we have now. And then the last, there has to be in our lives, a driving desire to see a great awakening.

A revival will impact a local church. It's typically confined to a church. Sometimes it spills over to another congregation. It'll impact a church for 18 to 36 months, maybe a little longer than that.