Yesterday I had a long conversation driving back from a fairly stormy beach. (It is spring: not swimming weather). The question he asked was what is the end game for our society. I suggested back to him that it could be three things: revolution, destruction of the nation, or revival. We discussed how the Wesleyan revival and the Welsh revival had probably stopped a revolution, and I explained that the last real revival was probably the Billy Graham crusades — and they occurred before I was born.
We then talked about how revival comes historically: it requires that a bunch of people pray fairly consistently and reform their lives: it is often people who have failed and have been broken, and all too frequently this is opposed by the established church. I made a somewhat snarky comment that in the Welsh Revival (probably, I have no data) the mine owner and the union boss were on their knees, in tears, repenting, and then working together to reform.
Last night my Brother came around to spend some time with Dad programming a GPS for him. (Dad, at 81, still breeds cattle. He is delivering bull semen around the country today). My brother is the practical one in the family, and has renovated many houses, trading up until he is in a good school zone. He mentioned that he went to a house auction a week or so ago of a deceased estate. In his view the house was tired and needed around 80 000 dollars worth of work on it. It was sold for over a million dollars. Entry level homes are now the same cost, in my home town, as a good house in Dunedin.
My son agrees with his grandfather. There is a housing bubble in Auckland, and no working family can afford a house unless they are working three jobs. Staying at home, for most women, is no longer an option.
This kind of fits with today’s passage.
Matthew 9:9-17
9As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him.
10And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. 11When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” 12But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. 13Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”
14Then the disciples of John came to him, saying, “Why do we and the Pharisees fast often, but your disciples do not fast?” 15And Jesus said to them, “The wedding guests cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them, can they? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast. 16No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak, for the patch pulls away from the cloak, and a worse tear is made. 17Neither is new wine put into old wineskins; otherwise, the skins burst, and the wine is spilled, and the skins are destroyed; but new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.”
Now one of the things son and I both said is that we do not feel righteous. We know we sin, and we know each other sins. However, God does not wait for perfection, for otherwise nothing would be done. He visits the spiritually sick.
With the aim that they do not remain sick. The advice we get from scripture is radical: it is completely against the culture of this age. The modern church teaches instead what the culture does: men bad, women good.
As you may recall, Rainey is not just the president and CEO of FamilyLife, but he also wrote the book-turned-video-series Stepping Up™, which is a modern Christian call to “godly” manhood. In Scripture, husbands are called to be the spiritual leader of the family, and wash their wives in the water of the word. In the modern Christian frame wives are light years closer to God and are called to lead and instruct their husbands. Rainey’s own wife explains how a modern Christian wife can lead her husband to manhood in her article 5 Ways to Help Your Husband Step Up to Manhood. Mrs. Rainey’s post is overall quite good by modern Christian standards, but it starts from the flawed premise that the wife’s job is to lead her husband, to get him to “Step Up” and become a man:
This will not work. We are supposed to be different. We should expect to be shunned and persecuted. Appeasement simply will not work, for the spirit of any age is anti Christian, and this time is not an exception.
We forget that the price of revival is repentance. We need to be honest: many of our men are looking at the cost of relationships (let alone marriage) and saying that they can take care of their physical needs quite nicely using pornography — living with a woman is simply too risky, married or not.
We have to change the economics of our societies so women can literally choose to be at home and raise their children — and this may require that the church subvert the bankers, and use the skills of the men in the congregation to build and maintain basic decent housing funded by the congregation, on a regular basis, for the congregation.
And we need to start respecting men as much as we should respect women (since I am reformed the correct level is not at all , we are all depraved). We have a structure of how we should run families mentioned both in the Old Testament and New. It’s a structure that works and is sustainable.
We should not mirror this culture, for it is deeply flawed. Instead, we should be God’s witnesses against it. Until we start doing that, it is unlikely that God will be merciful and let revival come.
