Revival

For the first time, I’ve been getting excited about the idea of revival.

I was having a classic in depth with my great friends Chris and Lorna, and we were coming to terms with the reality that despite all our intentions, efforts and talents to change the world for the better, ultimately the best we seemed to have achieved was just to stop it getting any worse... for the brief time we were involved. Lorna spent a couple of years caring for mentally ill teenagers locked up for committing horrific crimes. It nearly killed her.

As usual, this is exactly what Jesus says we should expect. He said that people who follow him will act as ‘the salt of the earth’, preserving it like meat from going off. He didn’t say we could make it fresh again. This is also echoed by the scientific law of ‘entropy’; everything is gradually inevitably always breaking down, unless dramatic efforts are made to stop it. You can see this in relationships, in society, in your own body... Which led me to the question, on Chris and Lorna’s sofa, Mumford and Sons admitting they’d really fucked it up this time, as to why there was any good left in the world at all?

Jesus once said, ‘what is impossible for men, is possible with God.’ And I remembered my history. In the 18^th century Britain was on the verge of revolution. The Americans had done it in 1776, the French in 1789. It looked like we were next. But I read some historians say that we were kept from anarchy and bloodshed by a completely different sort of revolution: the evangelical revival. Famous for people like John Wesley (is a weatherman) and George Whitfield, the revival was a period of few years when millions of ordinary people in Britain stopped drinking their families’ money, stopped living hypocritical religious lives, followed Jesus, and as a result, completely changed the face of the country.

People who became Jesus-followers in that revival abolished the slave trade; pioneered massive social and democratic reforms in the UK, putting ahead of the rest of the world for a century; and built massive successful businesses like Cadbury and Guinness that nurtured their employees and made the British economy the most powerful in the world.

Do you think we need a revival like that again? Human trafficking and trade injustice today is at least as shocking as the slave trade then. 20% of the British population are cut off from the prosperity of the rest by a cocktail of addictions, depression, debt, family breakdown, and generational worklessness. And our economy is royally screwed.

I’m a realist. I don’t believe any government can sort out this mess. In fact, I don’t believe any people could at all. We need God to lay the smack down on our cynicism, selfishness, dishonesty and fear. To give us supernatural wisdom, skill and stamina (this is turning into Robot Wars). To so saturate our country with himself that the meat becomes fresh again, and everyone gets a chance to experience the joy of knowing Jesus.