Let no Christian's heart fail him because it seems that the enemy has come in like a flood, that the voice of the prophet is not heard in the land. God has His men hidden. They will come forth without price tags, with nothing to sell, nothing to promote but His message, nothing to organize, nothing to propagate but holiness unto the Lord.
John the Baptist came at a critical hour in the history of Israel. The parched souls sought him in the heat-laden desert. England, dead under the teaching of Deism and thickly foul with corrupt politics, hardly offered loving arms to the Oxford scholar, Wesley. Injustice, unequal taxation, vice, drinking, etc. were all at a premium in Wesley's day. To the nation dead in politics and with icicles on the pulpits and snowmen in them, Wesley brought the torch of Spirit-anointed preaching and the nation melted before him.
The cultists and purveyors of false doctrine, with millions to spend on scattering their false doctrines worldwide, offer us greater challenges than Wesley or Finney had, but not greater than our God is able to deal with. Our present evangelism offers men a change of destiny- Biblical regeneration offers men a new Spirit-born personality, then destiny.
Revival is the Lord's doing, and is marvelous in our eyes. Wet-eyed, heart-broken revivalists produce wet-eyed, heartbroken sinners at the feet of a Holy God. True revival, said dear Dr. Tozer, "changes the moral climate of a community". Men like John the Baptist, and Wesley burned their names on the history of the world.
At the moment, we are a broken nation, broken financially, morally and spiritually. If we were half as spiritual as we think we are, we would be going to the house of the Lord in sackcloth with a handful of furnace ashes to anoint our unworthy heads. But we still play church. We still delight in shallow preaching and offer shallower praying. Our sackcloth and ashes would be less conspicuous than Isaiah, "walking barefoot and naked" for three years as a sign.
Jeremiah mourned the sin of the people. His castigations of their iniquity cost him a spell in the stocks, the inside of a prison, and the misery of sleeping at the bottom of a muddy well. He knew better than to say, peace peace, when there was no peace. He alone knew the pending judgments of God. He sat alone because of the wrath of God (Jer 15:17).
Oh for men who will wait upon the Lord, hear His voice, get a baptism of His power and an authority to deliver His message to a sick church and a dying world. We have labored in the flesh for too long. We have interpreted success by material gain- bigger buildings for our churches, bigger crowds for our hearers, bigger offerings as proof of His favor. We have had weak preachers for too long- God give us giants! We had promoters too many, Lord send us revivalists. We have played evangelism with a hundred gimmicks; Lord give us, in this dark hour of human history, some John the Baptists to burn and shine, some Knox to say, " Give me America and the nations, or I die".
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