Did you start praying for revival this past week? Remember, every revival was preceded with prayer and repentance. The season of Lent is an excellent time to focus on how we have fallen short of God’s call and need His forgiveness.

Last week I set a vision for what revival may look like in our lifetime. This week I want to take a step back and focus on holiness. We need to be a holy people so that when revival comes we will be ready to be used by God. “We are to become holy as Christ is holy; we are to become true Christians, the root meaning of which is ‘litte Christs'” (Colson, “The Faith” p. 160). Make no mistake, a life of holiness is not for the faint of heart! We are so busy today in our culture and so much is clamoring for our time, energy, and attention. Satan wants nothing more than to make us so busy that we don’t think we have time to do our devotions! In fact, that is one of his most effective tools. David Jeremiah said there are 11 things Satan does to make us lose our holiness by redirecting our focus away from Jesus:
Satan…
1. Keeps us busy with non-essentials
2. Tempts us to over spend and go into debt
3. Makes us work long hours to maintain empty lifestyles
4. Discourages us from spending time with family
5. Overstimulates our minds with television and technology so we can’t hear God speaking to us
6. Fills our coffee tables with newspapers and magazines so we have no time to read the Bible
7. Keeps us chasing material things
8. Fills our minds with images of models so we become disinterested in our mate
9. Makes sure couples are too tired for physical intimacy
10. Involves us in good causes so we don’t have time for eternal ones
11. Makes us self-sufficient, keeps us busy working in our own strength so we will never know the power of God working through us

With an enemy as diligent as Satan working against us, we need to be intentional about our spiritual disciplines so that we will be ready when God calls us to help His people. We must repent of our sins and be in prayer so that we can live Romans 12:2 transformed lives!! When we are doing this, we will be about the work of revival which is disciple-making. Are you preparing yourselves?

More to come…
Jeremy