Hope

I don’t have much hope in the church as it exists in New Zealand at the current time. I observe an unwillingness to change and do things differently that has become entrenched over many years. God will not force the church to change. He has been urging change for many years, but no one is listening.

The reality is that a church that is unwilling to change cannot be revived. It actually needs a radical reformation, but there are no leaders working towards that. I have described a few of the changes that need to take place in Twelve Big Ones.

The truth is that if a real revival came to New Zealand right now, the church would not be capable of discipling thousands of the new believers so many would eventually be lost. If 100,000 people chose to follow Jesus in Christchurch this year, the church would know what to do with them. God will not send revival now while it is too risky.

When people pray for revival, they don't think about what they will need to differently. They think about what they expect God to do, and perhaps what they expect other people to do. That is an ingredient for nothing happening.

I have heard people prophesying that God will send revival to New Zealand for fifty years, and these prophecies have failed. Prophesies about what God is going to do are pointless because he will not force himself on his church. We actually need more prophecies telling the church how it should change, but unfortunately, those are not so popular.

Real Hope

This current season is disturbing and confusing for many Christians.

In the western world, the church has been going backwards for the past fifty years. Some brilliant theology has been written, but the world is not listening. Some wonderful people have come out of seminary to serve the church, but they have been trained to preach to Christians; they have not been trained to do what Jesus disciples did. A few large churches have been established, but their growth does not compensate for the losses from thousands of smaller churches.

The consequence of this decline is that governments have been stopped being pro-Christian, and worse, the spiritual powers of evil have gained greater authority to work evil on earth. So the situation in the world has got worse, too.

Some Christians don’t care about this decline, because they see it as a sign that the end is near when Jesus will return to rescue them, but that is a false hope that is an insult to the Holy Spirit. Christians have been saying that the return of Jesus was imminent for the past century, but it now seems to be further away.

Although the church has been declining in the West for the last fifty years, most Christians have not been too worried, because they have always believed that a revival was coming, and that will turn the situation around. Even those who believe that the end is near are expecting a great end-time harvest.

The internet prophets continue to ramble on about a coming revival, and people who are desperate for hope draw hope from them, but those who are wise know that these prophets have been wrong so many times that they cannot be trusted.

Christians looking for revival will be disappointed because the next move of God will not come in the form that they are expecting. The revivals of the past were church-based movements where lukewarm or lapsed Christians were revived and drawn back into the existing church structures.

The reality is that the modern church does not want revival because it is unwilling to make the changes that God needs it to make so that he can accomplish his purposes on earth. Pastors have chosen to keep on doing what they know how to do, even though it does not work in the modern world, and the people are mostly happy to go along. The modern church is persisting with big-man leadership and big Sunday meetings, but these practices are serious obstacles to the next move of God.

God is not interested in reviving the church during this season. He wants to do something far greater. He wants to establish his kingdom on earth, and he needs people who are committed to working with his Holy Spirit to do it. Unfortunately, the modern church does not have a vision for the Kingdom of God that is real.

The modern church does not have the spiritual strength to engage a full-frontal attack on the kingdoms of the world to establish the Kingdom of God. The spiritual powers of evil are too deeply entrenched in our political and cultural systems to be easily defeated. To turn the situation around, the church will need to engage in guerrilla tactics and establish tiny strongholds on the edges of society and slowly expand out from there to gain more ground.

God wants to do something quite different from what the church has done in the past. His next move will be neighbourhood-based on the edge of society and away from the centres of power and privilege. To be prepared for the next season, followers of Jesus must seek out different ways of operating on the edge of culture.

The next move of God will not be like Billy Graham preaching to large crowds of lapsed Christians (who would struggle to get on board with what God is doing now), nor like televangelists preaching prosperity and comfort. They will be more like the seventy disciples that Jesus sent out in pairs, going to a village or neighbourhood of a town and living there in unity with some brothers and sisters in the Lord, loving one another, healing the sick and announcing the Kingdom of God.

I presume that the church will continue to implode as continues with the old way of working. Big-name pastors will be persecuted if they continue to push salvation by law as the solution to big social issues. At the same time, society will continue to disintegrate as the spiritual powers of evil are given more and more control on earth. But the idea that this is the beginning of the end is a lie that we should reject.

The best is still to come. God is calling and preparing a body that can work with the Holy Spirit to bring in the Kingdom of God on earth. When human political power collapses under the weight of its own evil, breaking the power of the spiritual powers of evil (and the Jews come to faith in Jesus), the Holy Spirit will move in power amongst those who have prepared. He will release a powerful move that will bring in the greatest harvest that the earth has ever experienced. Billions of people will choose to follow Jesus and join his kingdom, as they follow the leading of his Holy Spirit.

This is a discouraging season for those who trust in the church. Those who are trusting in the Holy Spirit and are open to his leading and looking for him to move in a new and better way should be excited by the opportunity that is open to them.

See Ekklesia and Kingdom.

Deferred Hope

I chose to become a follower of Jesus in 1974. Soon afterwards, I began to hear/read prophecies that God was going to send revival to New Zealand. Similar prophecies were common right up to the present day. Many visiting international speakers would say that God is going to do something big in New Zealand. For all of my life as a follower of Jesus, we have had this promise in front of us that revival is coming soon.

Humans need hope, so when we get a message that gives hope, we naturally cling to it. The hope that we have in Jesus gives us purpose for life. A hope that is true, strengthens our faith.

On the other hand, trust in a false hope can sustain us for a time, but because it does not deliver, a false hope eventually leads to disappointment. The well-known proverb says,

Hope deferred makes the heart sick,
but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life (Prov 13:12).

A hope that never comes weakens the faith of those who trust in it. In contrast, a hope that is fulfilled strengthens their lives. A hope of imminent revival has been around for most of my adult life without being fulfilled. I have been wondering about the effect of a hope that is promised continuously throughout a lifetime, but is also constantly deferred. I presume that many Christians would say that it has inspired them to keep going in serving Jesus.

However, there is another side to this issue. The message to the church has been that revival is coming soon. The hope that has been declared is that a visitation of God is near. A hope that better times are coming soon can cause us to put off doing activities that are demanding until our situation improves. We can unconsciously slip into the habit of deferring tough changes that are urgently needed until the time when the visitation of God comes, because they will be easier then.

I cannot help wondering if the prophecies that revival is coming soon prevented Christians from doing some of the things that God was calling them to do, because they assumed that it would be easier to do them when the revival had come.

We can’t know the answer, but what would have happened instead, if we had had prophecies for the past forty years declaring that we are going into a tough season when hostility to the gospel would massively increase, our society would be increasingly secularised and that many of the common activities of the church would cease to be effective. Would some Christians have given up? I doubt it. Maybe it would have inspired those who were serious about the gospel to work harder at sharing it? Maybe it would have inspired those who were interested in becoming a real community to strive harder to love one another as Jesus loved us.

The prophecies that a visitation of God would bring a massive revival very soon were not really totally true. Maybe they lulled the people of God into a false sense of security that everything would be fine, although they were not. We still assume they were good because they were encouraging, even though the expected fulfilment did not come; but maybe they did more harm than good.

In 1974, a prophecy that revival was not coming soon but was a long way off would have been truer than what we got. That might have spurred people on to greater zeal for Jesus than a hope that seems to have been repeatedly deferred. If I had known in the 1980s that the promises of revival would not be fulfilled during the next thirty years, I might have done some things differently.

This is also a challenge to prophetic people making declarations about what God is going to do. Timing is important. If their promises are for a distant future, they should be careful not to give the impression that the fulfilment is close, because they could be creating a hope that will soon be deferred. Repeating the promise again is not the solution to a deferred hope.

The modern church needs a more realistic diagnosis of the current situation. It needs a prophetic voice that will stop talking about what God is going to do soon and focus instead on what God wants his people to do now.

False Hope

I am amazed at the number of Christians who have put their faith in President Trump to rescue America.

Tiberius was a relatively good Caesar, and a great general. Jesus did not prophesy that when Paul got to Rome, Tiberius would come to faith and establish the kingdom.

Pontius Pilate was a relatively good procurator. Jesus did not prophesy that he would be surrounded by prayerful people and becomes a leader in the kingdom of God.

Jesus praised the faith of the centurion who wanted his servant healed, but he did not prophesy that the centurion would become procurator over Jerusalem and establish the Kingdom of God there.

I have no confidence into Donald Trump.

I have no confidence in the Republican party.

I have no confidence in the Democratic party.

My confidence is in the victory that Jesus established by dying on the cross, rising from the dead and ascending into heaven.

My confidence is in the Holy Spirit moving in power when small groups of people live and proclaim the gospel in Jesus name.

Gospel Hope

I really liked these words from chapter 2 of Brian Zahnd's book called A Farewell to Mars: An Evangelical Pastor's Journey Toward the Biblical Gospel of Peace.

Jesus is the Savior of the world! This world that you and I inhabit—where we go to work, do our living, raise our children, and try to find meaning and happiness— Jesus is the Savior of that! Jesus is not a heavenly conductor handing out tickets to heaven. Jesus is the carpenter who repairs, renovates, and restores God’s good world. The divine vision and original intention for human society is not to be abandoned, but saved. That’s a big deal! It’s the gospel!

In fact, in the eight gospel sermons found in the book of Acts, not one of them is based on afterlife issues! Instead they proclaimed that the world now had a new emperor and his name was Jesus! Their witness was this: the Galilean Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, had been executed by Roman crucifixion, but God had vindicated him by raising him from the dead. The world now had a new boss: Jesus the Christ. What the world’s new Lord (think emperor) is doing is saving the world. This includes the personal forgiveness of sins and the promise of being with the Lord in the interim between death and resurrection as well as after the resurrection, but the whole project is much, much bigger than that— the world is to be repaired!

If what we mean by “Jesus saves the world” gets reduced to “saved people go to heaven when they die ,” then Jesus is simply the one who saves us from the world, not the Savior of the world. But this is not what the apostle John meant when he spoke of Jesus as the Savior of the world. John was talking about something much bigger and much more expansive than individuals “accepting Jesus as their personal Savior.” John (and the rest of the apostolic writers of the New Testament) presented Christ as the Savior of God’s good creation and the restorer of God’s original intention for human society. This is the gospel! This is the apostolic gospel, and it’s a gospel that gives us an eschatology of hope. By eschatology of hope, I mean a Christian vision for the future that is redemptive and not destructive— more anticipating the New Jerusalem and less obsessed with Armageddon. In our anxiety-ridden world, who can doubt that we desperately need an eschatology of hope?

Far too many American Christians embrace a faulty, half-baked, doom-oriented, hyperviolent eschatology, popularized in Christian fiction (of all things!), that envisions God as saving parts of people for a nonspatial , nontemporal existence in a Platonic “heaven” while kicking his own good creation into the garbage can! Framed by this kind of world-despairing eschatology, evangelism comes to resemble something like trying to push people onto the last chopper out of Saigon. But this is an evangelism that bears no resemblance to the apostolic gospel proclaimed in the book of Acts. Christianity’s first apostles evangelized, not by trying to sign people up for an apocalyptic evacuation, but by announcing the arrival of a new world order. The apostles understood the kingdom of God as a new arrangement of human society where Jesus is the world’s true King. Put simply: because Jesus is Lord, the world is to be redeemed and not left in ruin.

Brian has hit the nail on the head. In these times, we desperately need an eschatology of hope. Unfortunately, from reading the rest of the book, I am not sure if he has found one yet.

I have always believed that God wants us to have and an eschatology of hope. That is why I wrote my book Times and Seasons.

Hope for Christchurch

When a few of us gathered to pray for Christchurch last week, I thought I heard the Lord say something like this.

My love for Christchurch has not changed.
My purposes for the city are still the same.
A lot of stuff has been destroyed, but my plan for the city has not been side-tracked.
The stuff that is built on a true foundation still stands. It has not been shaken.
My plans for Christchurch are still on course.
Seek my purposes for Christchurch.
Nurture them!

Hope?

The people of Tunisia and Egypt are demonstrating great hope. Unfortunately they have placed their hope in things that are bound to fail.

The people of these countries believe that democratic governments are the answer to their problems. The Egyptians have demonstrated particularly strong faith in their military forces. These are both false hopes.

The people protesting want jobs and they want cheaper food. Democratic governments do not produce jobs. Employment is produced by employers. What these countries need is entrepreneurs and employers who can create employment.

Food shortages are emerging all over the world. Government subsidies for biofuels have exacerbated the situation. For the next few years, rising food prices will be the norm. Poorer countries will suffer most, as the rich countries make sure that there is food on their tables.

Egypt and Tunisia cannot escape this problem. Democratic governments will not be able to hold down the price of food forever, as attempts to control prices will lead to shortages.

Whatever political change occurs in these countries, their economic situation is like to decline. The jobs and cheaper food for which people are desperate, will not suddenly emerge. The promises of political leaders are a false hope.

False Hope, True Hope

The people of Jesus time were praying that God would take his power and reign, that he would become king. They hoped that he would exercise his sovereignty and rescue them. “You are the King of the world. Why don’t you come and be king, so the world can be put right.”

They were totally disappointed with Jesus. He came as King and Messiah, but not as they expected. They rejected his deliverance, and eventually Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans.

Most modern Christians have the similar hope. They want Jesus to return and put the world right. They will be disappointed, because Jesus has already done everything that he could do, when he died and rose again.

God is invading the world, not by Jesus returning, but through his Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is capable of doing everything further that needs to be done to restore peace and blessing to the world. He just needs willing people to work through. He needs people to trust in him, rather than looking for a vague future hope.