• “Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he” (Proverbs 29:18, KJV).
• “When there is moral rot within a nation, its government topples easily. But wise and knowledgeable leaders bring stability” (Proverbs 28:2, NLT).
• “If the foundations [of a nation] are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (Psalm 11:3).
Once again, therefore, we need to ask the question: How much longer will the Lord keep America from imploding if our society keeps moving in direct opposition to the expressed will of God?
The State of the Church
As deeply grieved as I am by the spiritual blindness and the shocking moral brokenness of our nation, I am even more deeply grieved by the state of the church in America. Where are the Christians? Where is the church? What difference are we making? The answer is painful to hear, but we must say it anyway. Too many people who say they are Christians are asleep or distracted or intoxicated by the world. Like the old country song says, too many people who say they are Christians are “looking for love in all the wrong places.” They have been seeking love and meaning and purpose outside of Christ and his love. As a result, the church is as weak as—or even weaker than—the culture itself.
In 2011, George Barna, the Christian pollster and researcher, released a fascinating but sobering book titled Futurecast, which I commend to your attention. In it he devoted considerable time to analyzing the state of Christianity in America today. What he found was revealing.
• 85 percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians.[326]
• 84 percent of Americans consider the Bible a holy or sacred book.[327]
• The typical American household owns four Bibles.[328]
Think about that for a moment. More than eight in ten Americans say they are Christians and consider the Bible a holy book. Yet over the last few decades, our country has experienced a moral and spiritual breakdown of unprecedented proportions. We have faced war and depression and even insurrection in our country’s history. But never have we seen such a wholesale abandonment of God and his commandments. How is this possible in a country where 85 percent of the people claim to be Christians?
Clearly, there is a serious disconnect between who Americans say they are, what they say they believe, and how they are living.
For example, there is no statistical difference between the percentage of married non-Christians who have been divorced (33 percent) and the percentage of married “born-again Christians” who have been divorced (32 percent).[329] Lynn and I have seen this happen among our own friends and acquaintances. People we know who once said they loved Jesus and were committed to helping build his church then betrayed the Lord and their spouses and let their marriages and families implode. Knowing that Christ warned in Matthew 24 that in the last days betrayal and apostasy would accelerate and people’s love for one another would grow cold hasn’t lessened the resulting pain and heartbreak.
At the same time, sexual sin is metastasizing through the church like cancer. In the year 2000, Focus on the Family reported that 63 percent of men—two-thirds of whom were in church leadership—who attended “Men, Romance & Integrity” seminars had admitted to struggling with using pornography in the previous year.[330] Focus on the Family also reported in 2000 that one in seven calls to the organization’s pastoral care line were regarding struggles with Internet pornography.[331] All over the U.S., pastors continue to resign from their pulpits because they are having adulterous affairs. According to Christianity Today’s Leadership Journal, “Four in ten pastors online have visited a pornographic website. And more than one-third have done so in the past year.” After assessing the increasing prevalence of such problems among pastors, the editors of the magazine warned, “If you think you can’t fall into sexual sin, then you’re godlier than David, stronger than Samson, and wiser than Solomon.”[332]
The apostle Paul called the church to be different from the world and thus a witness to the world of Christ’s redeeming power. “Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship,” Paul writes. “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect. . . . Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:1-2, 21).
The statistics from recent research on America’s social and spiritual crises are sobering, and there is ample evidence of the disconnect between what Christians say they believe and the way they are living. Allow me to share two more troubling examples.
First, only half of all born-again American Christians say they try to share the gospel with even one unsaved person one time—one time—per year.[333]
Second, only 15 percent of American Christians are being mentored or discipled, and only 2 percent of all American Christians say that discipling others, teaching them about Jesus, and helping them grow spiritually is a goal of theirs and would make them spiritually successful.[334]
How is this possible? How can the church be salt and light to the lost world if it is no different from that lost world? How can we possibly hope for a spiritual revival or a Third Great Awakening in this land if Christians are barely sharing their faith in Jesus Christ with one person a year and not following Christ’s great commission to preach the gospel and make disciples of all nations?
Jesus said in Luke 6:46, “Why do you call Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” This is an important question for all of us at this hour.
Four Reasons God Is Shaking Us
The Bible teaches us that in the last days, God “will shake all the nations” (Haggai 2:7). This shaking is not to punish people, though judgment will eventually come during the Tribulation and on the Day of the Lord. As we pray and hope for revival and healing in our country and around the world, we should thank the Lord for the time we have left, however much that is. We should also thank the Lord for shaking us in all kinds of ways. These shakings are sometimes physical and sometimes metaphorical, and I believe they have four key purposes.
Because He Loves Us and Wants Us to Wake Up and Turn to Christ
In John 3:16, the Lord Jesus was crystal clear about God’s attitude toward the world. He said, “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” God sent his Son to offer forgiveness and eternal salvation to anyone who would repent. In other words, God doesn’t want us as individuals, families, or nations to implode or perish. Rather, he wants us to put our faith in Jesus Christ and follow him. Sometimes, therefore, he shakes people to get their attention and help them realize their need for him.
In his letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul pleads with the church to wake up. “This is all the more urgent, for you know how late it is; time is running out. Wake up, for our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The night is almost gone; the day of salvation will soon be here. So remove your dark deeds like dirty clothes, and put on the shining armor of right living” (Romans 13:11-12, NLT).
The proper response to this kind of divine shaking, the Bible indicates, is to repent. But what is repentance?
Lynn and I have tried to teach our four sons what repentance means in a very simple way. Our youngest is Noah. Sometimes I’ll bring Noah over to my side and say, “Noah, start running away from me, out of the family room, through the kitchen, and to the dining room. Ready? Go!” So Noah starts running. Then suddenly I say, “Stop, Noah!” And he stops. And I say, “Repent, Noah.” And he turns around. And I say, “Come back to Daddy!” And he comes running to me and jumps into my arms, and I hug him and kiss him. That’s repentance. God is telling us to stop because we’re running in the wrong direction, away from him. He tells us to repent—to turn around—and to come running back to him so he can forgive us and show us his love and restore us. And
that’s why he shakes us. He is trying to get us to let go of anything and everything we are holding—every form of ideology, philosophy, religious beliefs, political beliefs, or material possessions—whatever we’re holding on to that we think will give us hope and peace and security other than Jesus Christ.
Because He Wants Us to Realize There Is No One Else Who Can Give Us True Peace and Security
God doesn’t simply want us to stop going in the wrong direction. He wants us to move in the right direction, toward him, because he is the only answer to all of our personal and national problems.
In the Old Testament—in Jeremiah 17:13-14—we read, “Those who turn away on earth will be written down, because they have forsaken the fountain of living water, even the LORD.” So the prophet prays, “Heal me, O LORD, and I will be healed; save me and I will be saved, for You are my praise.”
In the New Testament, the Lord Jesus said, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, ‘From his innermost being will flow rivers of living water.’” Jesus “spoke of the [Holy] Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were to receive” upon salvation (John 7:37-39). Nothing else will quench our spiritual and emotional thirst except Christ’s “living water.” The Lord wants us to discover him and draw near to him and drink the water only Jesus Christ gives us.
Because He Has a Mission for His Church and for Each of His Followers
The apostle Paul writes in Ephesians 2 that born-again believers were “created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them” (v. 10). In that same chapter, Paul makes it clear that we are not saved by doing good works. Rather, we are saved by faith, in part so that we will do good works that the Lord long ago planned for us to accomplish for him. As such, God doesn’t want us to miss the blessing of serving him and seeing him bear fruit through our lives of obedience.
One of the most remarkable examples in the Bible of God shaking a man to get him to stop, repent, and get back to the important mission of serving the Lord is found in the Old Testament book of Jonah. Much of the narrative of that book is focused on a key biblical city in northern Iraq. I’ve had the opportunity to travel into northern Iraq four times in recent years to preach the gospel, teach the Word of God, assist with humanitarian relief efforts, and strengthen the local believers. In the spring of 2010, I was invited to bring a team of pastors and staff from the Joshua Fund, the nonprofit organization Lynn and I created to bless Israel and her neighbors, to conduct a pastors’ conference in northern Iraq, near the province of Nineveh. We have a son named Jonah, and he really wanted to go with me so he could see Nineveh. Lynn and I weren’t so sure about that, but we prayed about it and felt God’s peace, so Jonah came with me. But as we were flying in, a big storm came up and prevented our flight from landing in northern Iraq. We were diverted back to Amman, Jordan. There, I texted Lynn and told her what had happened and said Jonah and I were disappointed and weren’t sure what was going to happen next. She texted back to say, “Don’t worry. This would be the first time in history that a Jonah wanted to go to Nineveh and God prevented him from going. I think God is going to actually let you and Jonah get to Nineveh after all.”
She was right.
In the Bible, the Lord gave the prophet Jonah a mission: to take a warning of judgment and the urgency of repentance to the people of Nineveh (in what was then Assyria and is now northern Iraq), lest they face God’s wrath and implode. Jonah, however, refused to obey. Instead, he tried to run away from the Lord by boarding a ship that was heading for Tarshish, in modern-day southern Spain.
What happened? God began to shake Jonah’s world. Let’s pick up the story in Jonah 1:4-6.
The LORD hurled a great wind on the sea and there was a great storm on the sea so that the ship was about to break up. Then the sailors became afraid and every man cried to his god, and they threw the cargo which was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. But Jonah had gone below into the hold of the ship, lain down and fallen sound asleep. So the captain approached him and said, “How is it that you are sleeping? Get up, call on your god. Perhaps your god will be concerned about us so that we will not perish.”
You probably know the rest of the story. Jonah was tossed overboard by the ship’s crew, was saved from drowning by being swallowed by a huge fish, and three days later was belched up onshore, shaken to his core but essentially unharmed. From there he hightailed it to Nineveh and carried out God’s instructions. He could have avoided a lot of pain and hardship if he had just obeyed God to begin with, but eventually he repented and did as God had told him. And because of his words, the people of Nineveh—one of the most notoriously evil cities of the day—repented as well.
The story turns out well, but not without a whole lot of shaking going on. Jonah—a man of God, a prophet of God, a teacher of God’s Word—was on the run from God. He was asleep to God’s voice and resistant to God’s will. How convicting is this: that a pagan ship captain had to shake a teacher of God’s Word and wake him up and beg him to pray for his salvation?
What about you? What mission has God given you? Are you obeying, or are you on the run from the Lord and asleep to his voice?
Because Jesus Christ Is Coming Back Soon, and Time Is Running Out
The Old Testament prophet Joel pleaded with the people of God to wake up. “Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble,” he said. Why? “For the day of the LORD is coming; surely it is near” (Joel 2:1).
How do we know Christ is coming back? Because the Bible says so repeatedly, and Jesus said so himself numerous times. Here’s one example: in Revelation 22:12, Jesus said, “Behold, I am coming quickly, and My reward is with Me, to render to every man according to what he has done.” We are seeing the signs that the Bible says will precede Christ’s return. We are experiencing the birth pangs that Scripture foretold for the days before Jesus’ second coming. We are being shaken, as prophecy warned, because Jesus wants to wake us up. He wants us to be ready.
As we have already seen, we don’t know the day or the hour of the Rapture, but Jesus said we would know the season. Thus, we should be living as though his hand is on the doorknob, so to speak, ready to reenter human history at any moment. In Matthew 24:42, Jesus said, “Therefore be on the alert, for you do not know which day your Lord is coming.” In the next verses, Jesus said, “For this reason you also must be ready; for the Son of Man is coming at an hour when you do not think He will” (v. 44).
The world is not ready for Christ to return. People are lost. They don’t believe in the Resurrection, much less the Rapture. But the church is supposed to be the last best hope of any nation. The church is supposed to be ready and eager for the Lord to come, helping others wake up and get ready too. Yet how can the church be ready and be faithful in reaching the world with the gospel if she is asleep?
God’s Call to a Sleeping Church
In the book of Revelation, we read these words the Lord Jesus sent to the church in Sardis, a now-deserted city in modern-day Turkey:
I know your deeds, that you have a name that you are alive, but you are dead. Wake up, and strengthen the things that remain, which were about to die; for I have not found your deeds completed in the sight of My God. So remember what you have received and heard; and keep it, and repent. Therefore if you do not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come to you.
REVELATION 3:1-3
Is it possible that Christ’s words describe you? Or your family? Or the church congregation that you attend or serve at or pastor? Perhaps you have “a name”—a reputation—that you are spiritually alive. Yet maybe that’s not how Jesus sees you. Maybe he sees you as dead inside. Maybe you’re not obeying him. Maybe you’re not worshiping him—not really—with your whole heart. Maybe you’re not sharing the gospel with your family or friends. Maybe you’re not making any disciples, here at home or in any other country. Maybe you’ve never made a single d
isciple. Maybe you don’t even know what it means to make a disciple, even though Jesus commanded in Matthew 28:19, “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations.”
Now, then, is the time to wake up, for we are steadily running out of time.
Bottom Line
The 9/11 attacks, like other historic shocks in recent years, stunned us. They shook us emotionally and financially and militarily. They drove Americans back to church by the millions. But did it last?
George Barna’s research shows that “after the 9/11 attacks, religious activity surged, but within two months, virtually every spiritual indicator available suggested that things were back to pre-attack levels.”[335] In other words, the wake-up call came, and startled people jumped out of bed—but before long, they went back to sleep, back to business as usual.
Where are you at this moment? Are you awake or asleep? Are you running with Jesus, or are you running from him and from the mission he has for your life, like Jonah did?
God is shaking us because he loves us and he wants us to repent, because he wants us to know that Jesus Christ is the only one who can give us peace and security, because he has a mission for us, and because Jesus Christ is coming back sooner than most people think. Americans desperately need to wake up from the moral and spiritual slumber we are in. Most importantly, the church in America needs to wake up, purify herself, abide in Christ more faithfully and passionately than ever before, and once again offer families, communities, our nation, and the world the wonder-working power of Christ Jesus and his Holy Spirit.
For the church truly is America’s last best hope. If we don’t show the way back to the Lord, who will?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A CAUSE FOR OPTIMISM: INSIDE AMERICA’S FIRST GREAT AWAKENING
The outlook may be bleak, but I don’t believe it is hopeless. The U.S. is in dire straits, but we have not yet imploded.