Seeking a Revival Culture. Allen M. Baker
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we are the branches. Apart from Him we can do nothing, but attached to Him we can and will bring forth much fruit. You must obey God in all things, including loving Him with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself. You must love your wife or submit to your husband or train children in godly living. You must rejoice with those who rejoice and weep for those who weep. You must, but you cannot. You cannot love God and your fellow man or carry out any other command from God. You consequently thirst for righteousness, being like a tree planted by a stream of water that yields its fruit in its season. Abide in Jesus by faith. This is your only hope.
We attack our neo-pagan world by first and foremost holding onto the sovereignty of God and our identity in Jesus. Thus you should never be given to despair, anxiety, or hopelessness about the world or the state of the church. We must begin here. Change your thinking Christian, and let it grip you. Let it take possession of your heart.
4. Jones, Capturing the Pagan Mind, 6ff.
5. Ibid.
What We Learned from Harvard’s Fall
Be on guard . . . to shepherd the church of God . . . after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock.
Acts 20:28–29
In 1636, only six years after landing at Boston, the Massachusetts Bay Colony received a charter from the crown of England to establish a college to train men for the gospel ministry. The first great benefactor of the college, John Harvard, left half his estate and his library of four hundred books to establish the college across the Charles River in Cambridge. From the very beginning Harvard combined God-centered, Christ-exalting theology with scholarship, requiring all men, prior to their entrance to be able to read and understand the great Latin classics and to be able to decline perfectly the New Testament Greek noun and verb paradigms.6
Things generally progressed well at Harvard for the first sixty years or so, but finally a change in mood became noticeable. Students, faculty, and the general public clamored for a more open, tolerant, and catholic (universal) spirit, not being so narrow in the Puritan theology that permeated the ethos of Harvard. This shift gave way rather quickly to a change in methods. Thomas and William Brattle, two well-to-do brothers, established the Brattle Street Church that moved away from long expositions of Scripture in preaching to ritual and mere reading of the Bible in the worship services. They also discontinued the Puritan practice of requiring conversion narratives in order to become members of the church (what we call today a testimony of one’s Christian experience). Eventually a change in morals was noticeable among the students at Harvard who were preparing for the ministry in the Congregational Church. Already the Congregationalists in Connecticut were concerned about the slide into modernity at Harvard, and with the help of Increase Mather established Yale in 1701. In 1725 one complained that the students were given “to drinking frolics, poultry stealing, profane cursing, bringing live snakes and rum into their residences, and given to scandalous and shameful behavior.”7 When George Whitefield preached there in 1740 he was stunned by the carelessness of the students concerning their souls and their lack of experiential holiness. In 1776 the students at Harvard wrote the President, Samuel Langdon, demanding his resignation, saying, “Sir as a man of piety we venerate you, but as a President, we despise you.” An earlier president quietly went away, having made his house maid pregnant.
And finally—as so often happens in churches, schools, business, and families—a change in mood, that gives way to a change in methods, that gives way to a change in morals, eventually gives way to a change in message. In other words, a change in morality always dictates a change in theology in order to justify behavior. By 1800 Harvard was struggling to maintain the old Puritan, Calvinistic theology. Then President Joseph Willard died in 1803. The very next year, the Chair of the Hollis School of Divinity, David Tappan, someone who was committed to the old theology, also died. In his place the Board of Directors appointed Henry Ware, a Unitarian. The ensuing Unitarianism of Harvard has had a profound and lasting effect on our nation, in ways that most people cannot comprehend. This denial of biblical faith is the genesis of the public school movement of Horace Mann and John Dewey, both of whom were church-going Unitarians.
We are all prone toward spiritual declension (from the Latin word declinatio8), a falling away from biblical piety. Our mood may change first, thinking that vigilance in what we watch or listen to is not really that important. Since we are under grace, we may wrongly assume that oversight of what our children watch, and whom they befriend is not really a concern. The next thing that goes is our methods. We compromise and watch television programming we would never have considered ten years ago. We may depart slightly from the norm at work by putting a different spin on a report or product because, after all, our company needs a better bottom line for this quarter. And then our morals change. We justify lying by fudging our expense reports or income taxes or by complimenting ourselves on how we do not look at internet pornography, but see nothing wrong with perusing websites of the SI swimsuit or Victoria Secret models. By then, of course, knowingly or unknowingly we alter our message. Now we may champion doctrines like eternal security (once saved always saved) while ignoring sober warnings like Hebrews 10:26ff, “For if we go on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a certain terrifying expectation of judgment and the fury of a fire which will consume the adversaries.” We tend to ignore the statements of perseverance from Revelation 2 and 3, “To him who overcomes, I will grant to eat of the tree of life . . . he who overcomes shall not be hurt by the second death . . . to him who overcomes I will give some of the hidden manna . . . to him who overcomes, and he who keeps My deeds until the end, to him I will give authority over the nations . . .”
These warnings to persevere are why Elders or church officers are so vital to your spiritual life. They are to keep watch over your souls. A revival culture can develop when they point out tendencies toward spiritual declension and warn you of them, calling you to repentance if you succumb to the harlot. The harlot of Revelation is the opposite of the church, the bride of Christ. She seduces believers away from simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ, causing them to find their joy in money, things, hobbies, children, etc. Are you cold in heart? Have you lost your appetite for public and private worship? When is the last time you felt God’s presence powerfully working in you in public and private worship? By the way, this has nothing to do with the form of worship—contemporary, blended, or traditional. Are you moved by the worship of God? Are you careless with your sins? Has your mood, methods, morals, and message changed? Are you like the old Harvard that began so well but has become so debauched? Repent and do the deeds that you did at first or else Christ will come to you and remove your lamp stand (a Christ-centered church and preacher) out of its place. The gospel has left the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. America is not far behind.
Pray for your pastor and church officers, that they will take seriously their responsibilities as Christ’s under shepherds, and submit to their loving, humble, and gracious oversight.
6. David Beale, “Lessons Learned From the Fall of Harvard”, study paper, Bob Jones University.
7. Ibid.
8. From the Latin declinatio, a going down. Thus Latin or Greek declensions are a going down from the nominative to the accusative cases. I am indebted to Brian McCarthy for this insight.
Election
Just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him in love,
Ephesians 1:4