We are surely living in unusual days.
As we negotiate our way through week after week of isolation, it compels us to ask the question “Why?”
Eastern religions are based largely on fate. Fate does not allow us to ask “Why?” There is simply no answer. It just is, and we have to put up with it. There is no significance and no meaning to life or to what happens to us.
It is only because of the Biblical worldview that we can even ask the question “Why?” A Christian philosopher I once studied under made the mysterious comment that the whole progress of western civilization is built on the structure of the sentence. What he meant was we can ask questions, and expect to get answers. God is an orderly God who created things to work in an orderly and predictable way. Science is only possible on the basis of Abrahamic faith, knowing God as the Bible presents him. Islam piggybacked on that and also produced some pretty good science back in the day before it became dominated by fate-based extremists.
As ordinary Christians, we can leave the process of developing medical answers to the scientists. But for us there is a larger question looming. Why, Lord, have you allowed this and allowed it now?
The Bible presents even the judgments of God as aspects of his mercy. They are opportunities to get our lives right before we suffer worse.
As the days and weeks pass, I have become more and more convinced that something significant is on the way. Be sure of this: there will be both judgment and blessing.
The early scientists were mostly God-fearing people who based their research on the understanding that the God of the Bible made the world in an orderly fashion, and if we study it we will learn how it operates.
But we live in a society that has forgotten where the gift of knowledge came from. We have engaged in the idolatry of worshipping our knowledge of the world rather than the God who created that knowledge.
And now he is shaking our tree.
He’s shaking his church too. Shaking us out of prayerlessness and complacency, out of our own forms of idolatry, where we worship what we have in this world almost as much as we worship its Maker.
Revival is what we long for. But revival begins with a church on its knees crying out for mercy and repenting for its compromise.
God doesn’t require us to be perfect in our seeking of him. None of us are. But he does require that we make a start.
When we come out the other end of this, as we will, I want to find out why he created me to live in a day like this.
And if the church around the world finds this out, we may indeed be on the verge of a Great Awakening unlike anything we have ever seen. Our definition of what is possible will never be the same.
Sometimes the edge is the most exciting place to be.
CONSIDER PARTNERING WITH DAVID & ELAINE CAMPBELL IN HELPING TO SUSTAIN THEIR ACTIVE MINISTRY.
AWAKENING MINISTRIES // FOUNDATION of FAITH Project
Foundation of Faith Project is strengthening generations in faith and bringing beautiful changes to the communities around them. Through teaching, mentoring and coaching, many are finding out who they are and who they are destined to be. They are bringing more to their world. David Campbell is the key leader in this initiative and you can support him financially directly through Awakening Ministries.
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