Regressive Intercessory Vision: The “Past Revival” Syndrome

 

Here is the prophetic intercessory end game for victory in America. It is the ultimate hope for an 11^th hour “revival” that will somehow miraculously erase all the foregoing “Hydra” factors out of the culture, transforming America back into what we think it was like when the country started. As pertains to the election, the specific hope was that if McCain / Palin were elected, it could just buy us “a little more time” until this ever-prophesied but never-realized event shows up.

 

That has been the end game. 

 

While praying for revival in America has always carried a noble ring and been sincerely sought by so many of us, the revival concept as commonly cherished has serious problems that have masked spiritual reality and obfuscated divine purpose. Three issues stand as sentries between the intercessors and heaven that prevent this cry from being answered.  

 

Issue one: our cry for revival is based on an uncrucified image of our relationship to America, which in turn falsifies our vision of revival.

 

When saints pray for revival, most envision a “cultural revival”—one that returns the culture to imagined “good old days” before the Hydra came out of the pit. They don’t envision a falling down of the church and society under the conviction of sin, righteousness and judgment in preparation for “meeting thy God” and receiving His transcendent eternal Kingdom.

 

Most prayer for America is based on a desire to preserve a romantic image of relationship to a human culture that 1) is forbidden to us as disciples and 2) never really existed as we imagine it did. We pray based on a nostalgic longing (—the kind Lot’s wife had) and a “happily-ever-ever” dream out of which God is diligently seeking to shake us awake.

 

This cry for “revival” is equivalent to the desperate prayer of the teenage girl for the salvation of the ungodly boyfriend she is infatuated with and has already determined to marry contrary to the will of God. It is prayer that reinforces our basic problem: infatuation with our own reflection on society. 

 

Issue two: our vision for revival is colored by historical imagery that does not respect God’s dealings with nations based on their maturity / accountability cycle.

 

Let’s be fair. Not all prayer for revival is carnally motivated. This election did see genuine selfless prayer and fasting for revival based in a desire to see God’s righteousness established in American society. But even where the motive has been pure, vision for spiritual victory has rested on legends of past localized moves of God that happened under very different cultural conditions and stages of national accountability than what we face now.

 

Nations and cultures have life spans with a cycle of spiritual accountability. The terms on which God reveals Himself and holds men accountable in the early phases of a culture’s life are not the same as in its later phases. Yet we appeal to the Lord based on the way He first brought revival when the American consciousness still honored a basic scriptural fear and knowledge of God it has since abandoned. (For more in-depth consideration of this, please see the article Intercession—So As By Fire .)

    

But there’s more. We also make our appeal for revival through the veil of a historical lens that colors past revival events. Looking back at Acts 2, Jonathan Edwards, Cane Ridge, Azusa, and the Welsh Revival, we scour them of attendant flaws to create mythic portraits of revival that blind our ability to perceive God when He actually shows up. It is a more spiritual version of the problem in the first issue.

 

All told, while our motive for revival may yet be pure, our vision for revival is both antiquated and imaginary. Praying from such vision may sound impressive from the platform. But neither respecting present tense spiritual reality nor connecting with God’s mind, it has little effect against today’s forces of wholesale societal lawlessness. As long as we keep drawing from a past image of revival based in early phases of cultural accountability rather than from God’s present strategic mind in light of current spiritual reality, we are pouring hopes and prayers into a vision that cannot challenge the powers now gripping American life.

 

Issue three: our vision for revival does not respect God’s plan for the progressive revelation of His Son to the world.

 

This is a larger version of the antiquation issue we just studied. Where in the last issue our prayer for revival does not acknowledge the life cycle of national accountability, in this issue it does not acknowledge the life cycle of the age of revelation in which we live.

 

The problems plaguing American culture are massive. The reason they are so massive is that they belong to a far greater titanic conflict signaling the end of an entire age of Christ’s revelation to the world as known for 2,000 years. This is not just a cultural life cycle issue. It’s a revelational age life cycle issue. Against this measure of reality, praying for individual national revivals as we have known them in the gospel age is fast becoming obsolete.

 

It’s past time for us to update our paradigm of the Lord’s revelation to the earth. We keep praying for future divine interventions into national cultures based on what God has done since the opening of the gospel age, incognizant of the impending conclusion of that age. We are asking for God to show up in ways He has shown up before, instead of asking Him to appear in the next way He needs to for accomplishing His ultimate purpose: the revealing of His Son through a perfected People who will share dominion with Him over the earth based on His Glorified Word.   

 

Needed: A Transformational Kingdom Revelation of Jesus Christ

 

“Revival” presumes there is already a “Word,” ie, a Revelation of Jesus Christ, laid down in a culture to revive. But if a previously christianly enlightened culture becomes so brain dead, culturally diluted and Biblically illiterate that there’s no word to revive, there can’t be any “revival.”

 

America doesn’t need another revival. That’s because America is no longer America. America is now “Babylon.” You don’t bring revival to Babylon. You don’t bring revival to “Egypt.” To heathen places such as these, you bring a revelation of the “Word.”

 

At Pentecost, Jerusalem had the Word. So there was a place for revival. But Rome had no word. Greece had no word. When Paul went to these places, he didn’t go to bring “revival.” He went to bring the fresh Word of Christ in Kingdom power.

 

The same is true for Babylon. Babylon doesn’t need a revival. Babylon needs the Word. And Babylon the Great needs the Greatest Word. See, as a pharaoh arose who knew not Joseph, so a national generation has arisen that knew not the God of the nation’s forefathers. We’re not in colonial America anymore. We’re in Babylon.

 

We are at a juncture in human history when we need another earthquakingly transformational revelation of Christ Himself—the Word. Only a Revelation of Christ the Word unlike one the world has ever seen before can match the forces we are up against in America today. We don’t need the power to call down tongues of fire on our heads. We need the power to call down fire on all the cities of the world.

 

Coming Back to the Future

 

It has not been my desire to be unduly harsh on sincere prophetic intercessors who poured out hours of tears and fasting before the Lord and conducted some serious spiritual warfare over this election. But we do have to get real. And if we keep praying out of denial of cultural reality because we have a deceived attraction to our own reflection in culture, or if we are praying out of outmoded and imagined visions of divine intervention, we need to know it and deal with it. 

 

What do we need to see then? We need to stop praying based in America’s past and start praying toward our Kingdom’s future. We need to see that before the light of the last 30 years came into sight, America was already well under judgment. When the light came, it was not so much a “new day” as it was mercy under judgment awaiting a verdict. A key question from God’s viewpoint was, “Will they use My light in such a way to give Me reason to reverse the cultural judgment already in force?”

 

But in our steadfast failure to shed affection for the American dream, we really never dealt with judgment. We knew things were bad and tried to reverse them. But instead of seeing them as judgment already in force, we kept saying, “if we don’t do something, judgment will come.” And the “somethings” we kept trying to do remained rooted in a trust of political leaders further rooted in idolization of our American reflection.

 

To this day prophetic intercessory leaders still walk in denial of the overwhelming present judgment that has framed our light, continuing to speak of judgment in the future tense. As Dutch Sheets just said, “I fear judgment cannot be stopped now.” And now the light of the recent mercy has gone out. True, we did grow for a time under God’s Presence into awesome anointings for worship, prophecy and intercession we never had before. But when it comes to our penetration of cultural darkness, looking back, all we really ever did under our light was throw prophetic intercessory sticks and stones at tanks. We’re now essentially back to where we were in the late 1970’s—only now the scourges are far worse.

 

Does this mean the Lord has no more mercy to offer us? No. But the mercy to be offered is to come in a different way. And in the end, we’ll see it to be an even greater mercy than what we received the last 30 years. But it will also be far costlier. We’ll get to this. 

 

[note: this discussion was intended to be continued, but ends here…]

Chris Anderson
New Meadow Neck, RI

First Love Ministry
- a ministry of Anglemar Fellowship
http://www.firstloveministry.org

11/08

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