 ..
Steps
to the Renewal
of the
Christian
People
.
by
James
I. Packer
This essay was first given at
the Summons to Faith and Renewal
Conference held in October
1982 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA for
Christian leaders from Catholic,
Protestant, and Orthodox churches and
renewal movements. J.I. Packer's
strategy for renewal is still very
relevant as Christians strive for
greater ecumenical cooperation and
renewal of God's people today. J. I. Packer is a
well-known Reformed theologian, pastor,
teacher, and lecturer who has worked
tirelessly and generously for Christian
renewal and ecumenism for the past 40 plus
years.
The Task and the Method
In the following
presentation I address myself to a twofold task:
first, to formulate a clear view of what the
renewal of the church really is, and then to say
what needs to happen in order to get us there,
starting from where we are. And in tackling that
twofold task I have a twofold goal: to speak
both to your minds and to your hearts. For I
shall try, not just to state God's truth, but
also to apply it by way of challenging your
concern and your action. So, as I hope that this
will not be less than a responsible theological
discourse, I also hope that it will be more than
that. I intend, you see, not just to lecture but
also to preach.
Who am I, you may ask, to set myself this
agenda? Let me tell you. I am an expatriate
Englishman, an Episcopal pastor by calling and a
Reformed theologian by trade, who in 1945, soon
after his conversion, was given a copy of
Charles G. Finney's Lectures on Revivals of
Religion (1835), and who since that time
has carried a personal burden of concern for the
renewing of God's people through a fresh
outpouring of the Holy Spirit. On this subject I
have spoken repeatedly, written occasionally,
and thought constantly throughout those years.
Now I seek to enlist you for the pursuit of the
same interest, and I am grateful for the
opportunity to do so.
There is, however, one thing that I need to say
at the very outset about the manner of pursuing
an interest of this kind, Renewal in all its
aspects is not a theme for dilettante debate,
but for humble, penitent, prayerful, faith-full
exploration before the Lord, with a willingness
to change and be changed, and if necessary to be
the first to be changed, if that is what the
truth proves to require. To absorb ideas about
renewal ordinarily costs nothing, but to enter
into renewal could cost us everything we have,
and we shall be very guilty if, having come to
understand renewal, we then decline it. We need
to be clear about that. John Calvin once
declared that it would be better for a preacher
to break his neck while mounting the pulpit if
he did not himself intend to be the first to
follow God. In the same way, it would be better
for us not to touch the study of renewal at all
if we are not ourselves ready to be the first to
be renewed. I speak as to wise men; please judge
what I say.
By what method, now, shall we approach our
subject? Here the gates of two "by-path
meadows,' to use Bunyan's phrase, stand
invitingly open. First, it is tempting to come
at the renewal theme sociologically.
That would mean defining "the Christian people'
in external and institutional terms, as an
organized association with specific goals;
equating renewal with the achieving of those
goals; and then occupying ourselves in pragmatic
reflection on what structural and attitudinal
changes would have to be engineered in order to
realize these goals in a statistically
measurable way. The idea that the church's
health problems can be solved by such
manipulation is not unfamiliar, at least to
members of major Protestant denominations in
North America; analysts both inside and outside
denominational headquarters do a great deal of
thinking at this level. Nor do I dismiss such
analysis as useless; on the contrary, it does
much to make us aware of lacks and needs in the
church's life. But I urge most emphatically that
the renewal of the church is in essence a
spiritual and supernatural matter, a work of the
Holy Spirit enriching our fellowship with the
Father and the Son, and it takes more than
clever social engineering to bring this about.
Again, it is tempting to come at our theme historically.
That would mean identifying past movements of
renewal and revival, from the Old Testament
records of Israel's return to Yahweh under Asa,
Hezekiah, Josiah, Ezra, and others, and the New
Testament story in Acts of revival in Palestine
after Pentecost, through to the Cistercian and
Dominican and Franciscan movements; the ministry
of Savonarola; the Western Reformation; the
early Jesuits; English Puritanism and Lutheran
Pietism; the Evangelical Awakenings in old
England and New England in the eighteenth
century; the repeated stirrings of the Spirit in
Wales and Scotland between the seventeenth and
nineteenth centuries; the first hundred years of
the Protestant missionary movement; the frontier
revivals in America;
The worldwide quickenings among Protestants in
the 1850s and again in the 1900s; the East
African revival, now fifty years old and still
continuing; the awakenings in Lewis, off the
west coast of Scotland, in the 1950s, in Western
Canada in the 1960s, and in Indonesia and the
Californian “Jesus movement' in the 1970s; the
impact of the worldwide charismatic movement
over the past twenty years; and so on. It would
then mean analyzing, comparing, reconstructing,
and characterizing these movements in the way
that historians do, and seeking to produce out
of this exercise generalized typologies of
renewal for future reference.
Now I do not wish to minimize the very great
value of this kind of study. The psalmists
charge us to keep God's mighty works in
remembrance, and we should be glad that in our
day so much printed material on past renewal
movements is available to us. But if all we did
was study renewal historically, we should in the
first place be looking at it in a merely
external and this-worldly way, as the phenomenon
of changed outlooks and activities in certain
persons' lives, and in the second place we could
hardly avoid lapsing into what I call the
antiquarian fallacy about renewal, the
assumption, that is, that any future renewal
will become recognizable by conforming to some
pattern set in the past.
That there are such patterns is not in doubt;
they merit careful examination, and in that
connection I commend in particular Richard
Lovelace's pioneer theological phenomenology of
renewal, Dynamics of Spiritual Life
(1979). But we should limit God improperly, and
actually quench the Spirit, if we assumed that
future movements of renewal will correspond in
outward form to some past movement, and that we
can rely on this correspondence as a means of
identifying them.
Renewal is precisely God doing a new thing, and
though as we shall see every work of renewal has
basic qualities, or dimensions, in common with
every other, we must recognize that the contours
of the cultures within which the church has from
time to time lost its vitality, and also the
contours of that loss in itself, have varied;
which means that it is not safe for us to assume
that the outward forms and phenomena of revival
in this or any future age will always prove to
have exact historical precedents. At this point
sad mistakes in judgment have been made in the
past, and I suspect are being made by some in
the present. Let us strive not to be of their
number.
What I have said makes it apparent, I hope, that
our basic need in studying renewal is for
categories and criteria that are neither
sociological nor historical but theological,
which for me at least means biblically based.
With scripture as our guide, therefore, we shall
now discuss, first, the theology of
renewal (that is, the overall account that
should be given of renewal as a work of God);
second, the elements in renewal (that
is, specific things that occur when this work of
God is in progress); third, the quest for
renewal (that is, the steps in seeking renewal
which we and the segments of the body of Christ
to which we belong could take, starting now).
The Theology of Renewal
For some decades the word “renewal' has been
used loosely in the world church, with
applications as wide as they are unfocused. The
general sense that renewal is needed because the
church is not all that it should be is welcome,
but the vague way in which the word is thrown
around is unhelpful, to say the least.
Contemporary voices celebrate liturgical
renewal, theological renewal, lay renewal,
ecumenical renewal, charismatic renewal, and
renewal in other departments too; indeed, it
seems that any new outburst of activity in the
church, any cloud of raised by the stamping of
excited feet, will be hailed as renewal by
somebody. Certainly, there is no renewal without
activity, and when renewal is a reality every
area of the church's life should benefit. But
the implicit equating of renewal with enthusiasm
and activity is inadequate in two ways. First,
it gives an idea of renewal which is far too
inclusive: horizontally, so to speak, it
embraces too much. For in biblical thought and
experience renewal is linked with divine
visitation, purging judgment, and restoration
through repentance, and no amount of hustle and
bustle qualifies as renewal where these notes
are absent. Second, this equation gives an idea
of renewal which is far too superficial:
vertically, so to speak, it does not include
enough. It views renewal in terms of externals
only, and takes no account of the inward
exercise of heart in encounter with God in which
true renewal as scripture depicts it always
begins. But hustle and bustle do not constitute
renewal apart from this inward dimension.
How then should we define renewal? The word is
one of a group-spiritual, renewal, revival,
awakening, visitation, reformation-which tend to
be used together and need to be defined
together. Five of these six are correlated by
Richard Lovelace in a way which both corresponds
to usage and clarifies the realities involved. I
quote him. “Spiritual (as in spiritual
life, spiritual gifts) . . . means
deriving from the Holy Spirit, which is
its normal significance in scripture. Renewal,
revival, and awakening trace back
to biblical metaphors for the infusion of
spiritual life in Christian experience by the
Holy Spirit (see Rom 6:4, 8:2-11; Eph 1:17-23,
3:14-19, 5:14). Usually they are used
synonymously for broad-scale movements of the
Holy Spirit's work in renewing spiritual
vitality in the church and in fostering its
expansion in mission and evangelism. Reformation
refers to the purifying of doctrine and
structures in the church, but implies also a
component of spiritual revitalization. Renewal
is sometimes used to encompass revival and
reformation, and also to include aggiornamento,
the updating of the church leading to a new
engagement with the surrounding world.' To
Lovelace's definitions I add that visitation,
the sixth word in group, signifies the initial
divine approach to spiritually moribund
communities out of which their renewal comes.
Lovelace's two definitions of renewal
alert us to the fact that this is one of those
'concertina-words' which in use keep alternating
between a narrower and a broader significance.
The term carries its narrowest meaning
(concertina closed) when it is used of the
personal quickening of an individual. Used so,
it signifies that his spiritual life-that is,
his God-given fellowship with the Father and the
Son through the Spirit, the saving relationship
which finds expression in his praise and prayer,
his devotion and character, his work and his
witness - has been decisively deepened through
God's visiting his soul. (“His,' by the way, in
that last sentence includes “hers'; I am not
suggesting that only males experience personal
renewal) At the other end of the scale, renewal
has its broadest meaning (concertina open)
when it is applied to the church, for here, in
idea at any rate, it signifies revitalizing at
every level, starting with believers' inner
lives (what Puritans called their “heartwork')
and extending to all the characteristic public
activities in which the body of Christ is called
to engage. Following the thrust of the definite
article in my assigned title when it speaks of
"renewal of the Christian people,' I
focus in this paper on the latter, broader
application of the word. You cannot, of course,
have corporate renewal of any part of the body
of Christ on earth without personal renewal of
those who make it up, although the quickening of
individuals can and does constantly occur
without it being part of any larger local
movement; but here I shall speak of personal
renewal only in the context of corporate
renewal, the quickening of “the Christian
people' in this place or that.
In terms of biblical theology, now, we can
characterize God's work of renewal in the
following three ways.
First, renewal is an eschatological
reality, in the sense that it is a general
experiential deepening of that life in the
Spirit which is the foretaste and first
installment of heaven itself. Assurance of both
the shameful guiltiness and the total pardon of
our sins; joy, humble but exalted, in the
awareness of God's love for us; knowledge of the
closeness of the Father and the Son in both
communion and affection; a never-ending passion
to praise God; an abiding urge to love, serve,
and honor the Father, the Son, the Spirit, and
the saints, and inward freedom to express that
urge creatively and spontaneously-these things
will be the essence of the life of heaven, and
they are already the leading marks of
spiritually renewed individuals and communities
in this world. To describe situations of
renewal, as Protestants, using the word revival,
are prone to do, as heaven on earth is not
devotional hyperbole; intrinsically and
ontologically, that is exactly what the renewal
of the Christian people is.
Second, renewal is a Christological
reality, in two ways. First, it is subjectively
Christocentric, in the sense that awareness of
the gracious, beneficent personal presence of
the glorified Lord Jesus-“Jesus, my Shepherd,
Husband, Friend, my Prophet, Priest and King, my
Lord, my life, my way, my end,' as Newton's
marvellous hymn puts it; Jesus, who guards,
guides, keeps, and feeds me, and finally
receives me to be with him forever in glory, is
the very heart of the renewed Christian's sense
of reality.
The vision of Christ's glory, the realization
that every one of God's good gifts comes to us
through him and the passion to love and adore
him, come to pervade the minds and hearts of
persons in renewal to a degree that is a major
anticipation of heaven, as was said in the last
paragraph. The lady who explained to me her
identification with a certain renewal movement
by saying, "I just want the Lord Jesus to run my
life,' could not have been better directed: she
was after the right thing, and she was looking
for it in the right place. It is precisely in
renewal that love to Jesus and fellowship with
him become most clear-sighted and deep.
The most obvious evidence of this is the
hymnology of renewal movements. Charles Wesley
was the supreme poet of love to Jesus in a
revival context: think of his “Jesus, lover of
my soul,' and the final stanzas of “Thou hidden
source of calm repose'
Jesus, my all in all thou art,
My
rest in toil, my ease in pain,
The
medicine of my broken heart,
In
war my peace, in loss my gain,
My
smile beneath the tyrant's frown,
In
shame my glory and my crown;
In
want my plentiful supply,
In
weakness my almighty power,
In
bonds my perfect liberty,
My
light in Satan's darkest hour,
In
grief my joy unspeakable,
My
life in death, my heaven in hell.
Or
think of this, from the supreme preacher of love
to Christian renewal context, Bernard of
Clairvaux:
Jesus, the very thought of thee
With
sweetness fills my breast;
But
sweeter far thy face to see,
And
in thy presence rest.
O
hope of every contrite heart,
O joy
of all the meek,
To
those who fall how kind thou art
How
good to those who seek
But
what to those who find? Ah! this
Nor
tongue nor pen can show:
The
love of Jesus, what it is,
None
but his loved ones know.
Jesus,
our only joy be thou,
As
thou our prize wilt be;
Jesus,
be thou our glory now
And
through eternity.
One
mark of spiritual authenticity in the renewal
songs of our time-Christian camp fire songs, as
they have sometimes been called-is that in them
the theme of Christ's love to us and ours to him
surfaces once more, and strongly.
Second, renewal is objectively
Christocentric, in the sense that through it
believers are drawn deeper into their baptismal
life of dying with Christ in repentance and
self-denial and rising with him into the new
righteousness of combating sin and living in
obedience to God. Authentic revivals have deep
ethical effects; they produce authentic
sanctity-really, though not always uniformly,
tidily, or calmly - along with authentic
ministry one to another; and both these features
of authentic Christianity should be viewed as
the supernatural life of Christ himself living
and serving in and through his members by means
of the operation of the Spirit. Also, the
intensified communion with Christ should be seen
as based upon the dynamic reality of this our
union with him - or, better, this his union with
us.
The third point in the biblical concept of
renewal is that it is a pneumatological
reality, in the sense that it is through the
action of the Holy Spirit doing his New Covenant
work of glorifying the glorified Christ before
the eyes of the understanding of his disciples,
as was described above, that renewal actually
takes place. Here, incidentally, is a sure test
of whether particular stirrings of excitement
about interior experience of God are instances
of Holy Spirit renewal or not: as Jonathan
Edwards argued against critics of the Great
Awakening, it is not the devil who exalts
Christ, but the Holy Spirit, so that if the
experiences in question deepen Christ-centered
devotion, that proves their source. And if they
do not, that proves their source too. For
Satan's strategy is always to distract men from
Christ, and getting them to concentrate on
exotic experiences - visions, voices, thrills,
drug trips, and all the mumbo-jumbo of false
mysticism and nonrational meditation - is as
good a way for him to do it as any other.
In addition to characterizing renewal in this
way, biblical theology answers for us the
question, what place has renewal in God's
overall purposes? “Restore us again, O God of
our salvation,' prays the psalmist, “and put
away thy indignation toward us! Wilt thou be
angry with us for ever? Wilt thou prolong thy
anger to all generations? Wilt thou not revive
us again, that thy people may rejoice in thee?'
(Psalm 85:4-6).
Those verses, which can be matched from many
passages in the psalms and the prophets, beg for
a quickening visitation to the community
(“restore, or revive, us again') which will have
a twofold experiential significance. First, this
reviving will be experienced as the ending
of God's wrath, the termination of the
impotence, frustration, and barrenness which
have been the tokens of divine displeasure for
unfaithfulness. Second, this reviving will be
experienced as the exulting of God's people:
joy will replace the distress which knowledge of
God's displeasure has made the faithful feel.
Then, third, as appears most clearly from the
Acts narrative, such reviving is also
experienced as the extending of God's
kingdom.
God's visitation to renew his own household
regularly has an evangelistic and cultural
overflow, often of great power, leading to the
fulfillment in churchly terms of what Zechariah
foresaw in terms of the post-exilic restoration:
“Ten men from the nations of every tongue shall
takehold of the robe of the Jew, saying “Let us
go with you, for we have heard that God is with
you'' (Zechariah 8:23). Again and again, for the
glory of God in and through his church, this
pattern of events has needed to recur, and has
in fact recurred, both in and since the biblical
period.
In Dynamics of Spiritual Life, Dr.
Lovelace argues that the apparent antithesis
between the two models of cyclical and
continuous renewal which the Old and New
Testaments respectively seem to throw up is not
absolute since the same spiritual forces operate
in both types of situations. “I agree, and to
clarify the point I offer a distinction between
renewing or reviving as an act of
God - that is, the initial visitation which
sparks off a new movement - and revival
or renewal itself - that is, the state
of revivedness in which God's people continue
until for whatever cause the power of the
original visitation is withdrawn.
Thus one may say that Pentecost was a day of
renewing; that renewal conditions surrounded all
the protagonists of the church history recorded
in Acts, as the New Testament letters also show
by the quality of the devotional experience to
which they testify; but that six of the seven
churches of the Apocalypse had quenched the
Spirit, so that the quality of their inward
responsiveness to Jesus Christ was now
noticeably reduced, and repentance on their part
and a fresh visitation from their Lord was
urgently needed. How this might bear on the
present life of our own churches, and on our own
roles and responsibilities within them, is
something at which we must look with some care.
But first we should spend a moment reviewing the
elements in revival, which I announced as
the second part of our discussion.
The Elements in Renewal
The phenomena of renewal movements merit much
more study by church historians, theologians,
and exponents of Christian spirituality than
they have yet received. At surface level, they
vary widely, as do the movements within which
they appear, and we should not be surprised at
that. For, in the first place, spiritual
movements are partly shaped by pre-existing
needs, which in their turn reflect all sorts of
nonrecurring cultural and economic factors, as
well as many aspects of the morbid pathology of
sin and spiritual decline; and, in the second
place, the spiritual experiences of Christians
are determined in part by temperament, by
atmosphere, and by pressure groups, all of which
are variables; and, in the third place, God the
Lord appears to delight in variety and never
quite repeats himself. But at the level of
deeper analysis, deeper, that is, than verbal
and cultural variants and preset interpretative
grids, there are constant factors recognizable
in all biblical and post-biblical revivals and
renewals of faith and life, whatever their
historical, racial, and cultural settings. They
number five, as follows: awareness of God's
presence; responsiveness to God's word;
sensitiveness to sin; liveliness in community;
fruitfulness in testimony. Let me illustrate
them briefly.
(1) Awareness of God's presence. The
first and fundamental feature in renewal is the
sense that God has drawn awesomely near in his
holiness, mercy, and might. This is felt as the
fulfilling of the prayer of Isaiah 64:lf: “O
that thou wouldst rend the heavens and come
down, that the mountains might quake at thy
presence . . . to make thy name known to thine
adversaries, and that the nations may tremble at
thy presence.' God “comes,” “visits' his people,
and makes his majesty known. The effect is
regularly as it was for Isaiah himself, when he
“saw the Lord sitting on a throne' in the temple
and heard the angels' song-"Holy, holy,
holy'-and was forced to cry, “Woe is me, for I
am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips,
and I live among a people of unclean lips' (Is
6:1-5). It is with this searching, scorching
manifestation of God's presence that renewal
begins, and by its continuance that renewal is
sustained. Says Arthur Wallis: “The spirit of
revival is the consciousness of God.' Wrote
Duncan Campbell, out of his experience of
revival in Lewis from 1949 to 1953: “I have no
hesitation in saying that this awareness of God
is the crying need of the church today.' This,
and nothing less than this, is what the
outpouring of the Spirit in renewal means in
experiential terms.
(2) Responsiveness to God’s word. The
sense of God's presence imparts new authority to
his truth. The message of scripture which
previously was making only a superficial impact,
if that, now searches its hearers and readers to
the depth of their being. The statement that
“the word of God is living and active, sharper
than any two-edged sword, piercing to the
division of soul and spirit, of joints and
marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intents
of the heart' (Heb. 4:12) is verified over and
over again. Paul thanked God that when the
Thessalonians heard from the missionaries “the
word of God ... you accepted it not as the word
of men but as what it really is, the word of
God' ( 1. Thes 2:13). They did because “our
gospel did not come to you in word, but also in
power and in the Holy Spirit and with full
conviction' (1:5). It is always so in renewal
times. God's message-the gospel call to
repentance, faith, and holiness, to praise and
prayer, witness and worship-authenticates itself
unambiguously to men’s consciences, and there is
no room for half measures in response. That
leads to our next point.
(3) Sensitiveness to sin. Deep
awareness of what things are sinful and how
sinful we ourselves are - conviction
of sin, to use the old phrase - is the third
phenomenon of renewal that calls for notice. No
upsurge of religious interest or excitement
merits the name of renewal if there is no deep
sense of sin at its heart. God's coming, and the
consequent impact of his word, makes Christians
much more sensitive to sin than they previously
were: consciences become tender and a profound
humbling takes place. The gospel of forgiveness
through Christ's cross comes to beloved as never
before, when folk see their need of it so much
more clearly. That conviction of sin was very
much part of the early Christian story, and the
opening chapters of Acts give us three examples
of it.
In Acts 2:37-41 we see conviction accepted.
Peter's congregation was “pierced to the heart”
(2:37) with a sense of their guilt for
compassing Jesus' death. The Greek word for
“pierced' means literally to inflict a violent
blow; it is a painfully vivid image for what was
an acutely painful experience. Shattered, the
congregation cried out, “Brethren, what shall we
do?' Peter showed them the way of faith,
repentance, and discipleship, and three thousand
of them took it. Thus, conviction was the means
of their blessing.
In Acts 7:54-60 we see conviction resisted.
Stephen has accused his Jewish judges of
resisting the Spirit, murdering the Christ, and
showing contempt for the law (7:51-53). They are
“cut to the quick' (7:54)-the Greek word
literally means “sawn apart'; it expresses the
inner turmoil arising from the conjunction of
inescapable guilt and uncontrollable anger. Too
proud to admit they had been wrong, they ground
their teeth, yelled at Stephen, stopped their
ears, mobbed him, ran him out of town, and
stoned him to death. The trauma of felt guilt
had driven them into hysteria. Conviction in
this case was the means of their hardening.
Then in Acts 5:1-10 we see conviction killing
- literally. Peter tells Ananias that he has
lied to the Holy Spirit and so to God, and
Ananias dies. A divine judgment, certainly; but
what account of it should we give in human
terms? The most natural view is that in that
revitalized community, where sensitiveness to
the presence of God and hence to the foulness of
sin was exceedingly strong, the realization of
what he had done so overwhelmed Ananias that his
frame could not stand it, and he died of shock;
and Sapphira the same. They literally could not
live with their sin. Thus, conviction became the
means of their judgment.
What do we learn from this? That under revival
conditions consciences are so quickened that
conviction of sin becomes strong and terrible,
inducing agonies of mind that are beyond
imagining till they happen. But conviction of
sin is a means, not an end; the Spirit of God
convinces of sin in order to induce repentance,
and one of the more striking features of renewal
movements is the depth of repentance into which
both saints and sinners are led. Repentance, as
we know, is basically not moaning and remorse,
but turning and change: 'about turn, quick
march' is a good formula to express its meaning.
In 2 Corinthians 7:10, Paul says, “The sorrow
that is according to the will of God produces a
repentance without regret, leading to
salvation,' and in the next verse he applauds
the robustness of the Corinthians' repentance in
the matter about which he had rebuked them.
“What earnestness . . . this godly sorrow has
produced in you: what vindication of yourselves,
what indignation, what fear, what longing, what
zeal, what avenging of wrong!” Vivid conviction
produces vigorous repentance.
In times of renewal the impulse constantly
recurs, often in defiance of cultural
conditioning, to signalize and seal one's
repentance by public confession of what one is
renouncing: as was done at Ephesus, apparently
spontaneously, when “many . . . of those who had
believed kept coming, confessing and disclosing
their practices' (Acts 19:18), and some occult
practitioners went so far as publicly to burn
their very valuable books of spells-a costly and
humbling gesture, no doubt, but equally
certainly a liberating one for those who made
it. One or more of three motives prompts public
confession. It is partly for purgation:
individuals feel that the only way to get evil
things off their conscience and out of their
lives is by renouncing them publicly. Sins are
also confessed for healing (Jas 5:16): pocketing
pride and admitting one's faults and failings to
others is part of God's therapy. And, finally,
sins are confessed for doxology: “Come and hear,
all who fear God, and I will tell of what He has
done for my soul' (Ps 66:16). This kind of
confession is likely to appear spontaneously
wherever there is genuine renewal.
(4) Liveliness in community. Love and
generosity, unity and joy, assurance and
boldness, a spirit of praise and prayer, and a
passion to reach out to win others are recurring
marks of renewed communities. So is divine power
in their preachers, a power which has nothing to
do with natural eloquence. John Howe, the
Puritan, once Cromwell's chaplain, spoke of this
in a passage in a sermon on Ezekiel 39:29 (“I
have poured out my Spirit upon the house of
Israel, saith the Lord God'). Preaching in 1678
and looking back on the great days of the
Puritan revival under the Commonwealth, he told
his congregation:
When the Spirit shall be poured forth
plentifully . . . I believe you will hear much
other kind of sermons ... than you are wont to
do now-a-days. . . . It is plain, too sadly
plain, that there is a great retraction of the
Spirit of God even from us. We [preachers]
know not how to speak living sense [= sensus,
a feeling, felt reality] unto souls, how to
get within you; our words die in our mouths,
or drop and die between you and us. We even
faint, when we speak; long experienced
unsuccessfulness makes us despond. We speak
not as persons that hope to prevail, that
expect to make you more serious, heavenly,
mindful of God, and to walk more like
Christians. . . . When such an effusion of the
Spirit shall be as is here signified . . .
ministers . . . shall know how to speak to
better purpose, with more compassion and
sense, with more seriousness, with more
authority and allurement, than we now find we
can."
Also in
renewal times God acts quickly: his work
accelerates. When Paul left Thessalonika after
between two and three weeks' ministry there he
left behind him a virile church whose quality
can be gauged from 1 Thessalonians 1-3. God had
moved fast. No wonder Paul asks them to pray
that “the word of the Lord may speed on
literally, run) and triumph, as it did among
you' (2 Thes 3:1). Truth spreads, and people are
born again and grow in Christ, with amazing
rapidity under renewal conditions.
(5) Fruitfulness in testimony. Revival of
the church always has an evangelistic and
ethical overspill into the world: Christians
proclaim by word and deed the power of the new
life, souls are won, and a community conscience
informed by Christian values emerges.
Such in outline is the constant pattern by which
genuine movements of renewal identify
themselves. Christians in renewal are
accordingly found living in God's presence (coram
Deo), attending to his word, feeling acute
concern about sin and righteousness, rejoicing
in the assurance of Christ's love and their own
salvation, spontaneously constant in worship,
and tirelessly active in witness and service,
fuelling these activities by praise and prayer.
The question that presses, therefore, is not
whether renewal is approved as a theological
idea or claimed as a shibboleth of fashion (to
say “we are in renewal' is almost mandatory in
some circles nowadays). The question that
presses is whether renewal is actually displayed
in the lives of Christian individuals and
communities: whether this quality of Christian
life is there or not. Which brings us to our
final Section).
The Quest for Renewal
This is where analysis finally merges into
application and lecturing becomes preaching. I
have three points to develop: First, our guilt
in not being renewed, and God's call to us to
repent of it; second, our inability to renew
ourselves, and God's call to us to seek renewal
from him; third, our obligation to remove
obstacles to our being renewed, and God’s call
to us to act now in this matter. What this
amounts to is a summons to us all to be more
honest with God, more simple and thoroughgoing
in our response to his grace, more open and
straightforward both with him and with others,
than we may have been hitherto. Let me try to
spell this out as I understand it.
Theme one: our guilt in not being renewed, and
God's call to us to repent of it. For this I
need only refer you once more to the letters of
our Lord to the seven churches of the
Revelation. With only one of them, the
Philadelphian congregation, was the Savior
pleased; the Ephesian church was condemned for
having left its first love (2:4f), the church at
Sardis for being dead (3:1), and the church at
Laodicia for being self-satisfied and
self-deceived. “I know your works,' says Jesus
to them; 'you are neither cold nor hot. Would
that you were cold or hot! So, because you are
lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew
you out of my mouth. For you say, I am rich, I
have prospered, and I need nothing; not knowing
that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind,
and naked.... Those whom I love I rebuke and
chasten; so be zealous and repent’ (3:15-17,
19). It is hard to doubt that this is the mind
of Jesus with regard to many churches in North
America today.
Biblical theology knows no middle condition, for
churches or for Christians, between spiritual
advance under God's blessing and spiritual
decline under his displeasure. The root of
spiritual decline is always human unfaithfulness
in some form, and its fruit is always chastening
judgment from God, whose gracious plan and
supernatural enabling are hereby slighted and
dishonored. Marks of decline include high
tolerance of half-heartedness, moral failure,
and compromise; low expectations of holiness in
oneself and others; willingness to remain
Christian pigmies; apathy about the advancement
of God's cause and his glory; and contentment,
even complacency, with things as they are.
Charles Finney once said, “Christians are more
to blame for not being revived, than sinners are
for not being converted.' Was he right? It is,
at the very least, a question worth thinking
about as we reflect on the relevance to
ourselves of Jesus' words to the Laodiceans. And
perhaps in doing this we shall need to make our
own the words of the Anglican litany: "from
hardness of heart, and contempt of thy word and
commandment, good Lord, deliver us.'
So we move to theme two: our inability to renew
ourselves, and our need to seek this blessing
from God by prayer. The point here is that
whereas self-reliance, expressing
self-sufficiency, is natural (we might almost
say, instinctive) to us in our fallenness, it is
beyond us to compass spiritual renewal by any
form of activity that we organize.
The principle is that underlying Isaiah 22:8-14,
where Judah's feverish bustle of defensive
activity in face of trouble was ruling out
anything in the nature of a genuine return to
God and a genuine dependence on him for the
deliverance which only he could give. To look to
human ingenuity, however, for that which only
God in his grace can give is arrogant, inept,
and in the outcome barren. And that is how it is
in the matter of renewal.
When Christians, by the Laodicean character of
their lives and their ecclesiastical systems,
have quenched the fire of God's Spirit, and so
brought about a withdrawal of God's presence and
glory, it is beyond their power to kindle the
fire again, much as they might wish to do so;
only God himself, by his own quickening
visitation, can renew, and for this we have to
wait on him in patient, persistent, penitent
prayer until he is pleased to act. Charles
Finney, who for a decade after his conversion
was used by God in a continuous revival
ministry, came to think, evidently generalizing
from that experience, that self-examination and
earnest prayer on a congregation's part would
always secure a divine visitation and fresh
outpouring of the Spirit immediately. But the
experience of many who have sought to implement
this formula, and indeed the different and
disappointing experience of Finney himself in
later years, shows that this is not so.
In no situation can revival be infallibly
predicted or precipitated; there are no natural
laws of renewal for man the manager to discover
and exploit. That, however is no cause for
discouragement, for the other side of the coin
is that the possibility of renewal can never be
precluded either; no one can set limits to the
graciousness of God who has promised that we
shall find him when we seek him with all our
hearts. To seek God and his renewing grace,
recognizing that he can renew us though we
cannot renew ourselves, is in this instance the
only constructive thing that is open to us to
do. “Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and
you will find,' says our Lord (Mt 7:7). The
Psalter provides several pattern prayers for
this purpose, notably Psalms 44, 67, 74, 79, and
85. Waiting on God in constant acknowledgment of
need, pleading that he should move in mercy, is
the way forward here.
Finally, we move to theme three: our obligation
to remove hindrances to renewal, and God's call
to us to begin doing this now. A moment ago I
said that we cannot precipitate a visitation
from God. That is true; God is sovereign in
these matters and takes action to answer prayer
at his own speed and in his own good time. Yet
there is something we can do at this present
moment to bring spiritual quickening nearer, and
that is to break with things that are in their
own nature Spirit-quenching.
For instance: surely clericalism as a
leadership style is Spirit quenching.
Clericalism, which on my analysis involves more
persons than the ordained, is a sort of
conspiracy between leaders and those led: the
one party (it does not matter which) says, “all
spiritual ministry should be left to the
leader,' and the other party says, “yes, that's
right.” Some leaders embrace clericalism because
it gives them power; others, running scared,
embrace it because they fear lest folk
ministering alongside them should overshadow
them, or because they feel incapable of handling
an every-member-ministry situation. But every
member-ministry in the body of Christ is the New
Testament pattern, and anything which obstructs
or restricts it is an obstacle to a renewing
visitation from God. What does this suggest that
leaders, and others, ought to do now?
Again: surely formalism as a worship
style is Spirit-quenching But many churches seem
to view worship in a way that can only be called
formalistic, for their interest is limited to
performing set routines with suitable
correctness, and there is no apparent desire on
anyone's part actually to meet God. What does
this suggest that leaders, and others, ought to
do now?
Yet once more: surely personal attitudes of complacency
about things as they are is Spirit-quenching.
Think of your own church or fellowship: to what
extent do you see in it the reality of worship?
faith? repentance? knowledge? holiness? Do its
members resolutely, energetically, passionately
love the Lord? Do they love each other? How do
they pray? How do they give? How much support do
they get from each other in times of personal
need? How much sharing of their faith do they
do, or try to do? Ought you to be content with
things as they are? Think also of yourself, and
of what these folk see in you. Ought either they
or you to be content with what you are? It must
be expected that those led will become like
their leaders; that is the natural thing to
happen; but if it happens so in your church or
fellowship, will that be good enough? What does
this lien of thought suggest that leaders, and
others, ought to do now?
The first step, perhaps, to the renewal of the
Christian people is that leaders should begin to
repent of their too-ready acceptance of too-low
levels of attainment both in themselves and in
those whom they lead, and should learn to pray
from their hearts the simple-sounding but
totally demanding prayer in Edwin Orr's chorus:
'send a revival-start the work in me.'
The second step, perhaps, is for leaders to
challenge their followers as to whether they are
not too much like the Laodiceans of Revelation,
and whether Jesus' searing words to these
latter-'you are lukewarm. . . . you say, I need
nothing; not knowing that you are wretched,
pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. . . . be
zealous, and repent. Behold, I stand at the door
and knock....'-do not apply directly to
themselves, here and now.
The third step, perhaps, is for us all, leaders
and led together, to become more serious,
expectant, and honest with each other as we look
to God in our use of the means of grace-sermon
and sacrament, worship and witness, praise and
prayer, meditation and petition-and as we seek
to make our own the psalmist's plea: “Search me,
O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my
thoughts! And see if there be any wicked way in
me, and lead me in the way everlasting!'' (Psalm
139:23-24). Then the fourth step, perhaps, will
be to trust the Holy Spirit to lead us on from
there.
Does this prospect strike awe into you? I am
sure that it does, and it has the same effect on
me. But that is no justification for drawing
back from it, when our need of it is so plain,
“O Lord, I have heard the report of thee, and
thy work, O Lord, do I fear. In the midst of the
years renew it; in the midst of the years make
it known; in wrath remember mercy' (Hab3:2).
Let all the people say: amen.
This essay was first published in Summons
to Faith and Renewal: Christian Renewal in a
Post-Christian World, (c) 1983 by the
Alliance for Faith and Renewal, Ann Arbor,
Michigan.
J. I. Packer is a Reformed theologian and
retired professor of theology at Regent
College, Vancouver, Canada. He is a prolific
author, and a well-known pastor, teacher, and
lecturer. |
