In This Issue:

 

And Then They Repented? Reflections On Ted Haggard, Repentance & Revival

Here's Your Chance To Escape (Unsubscribe)

 

 

Recent events have brought back into sharp relief a message which, I believe, God has been speaking to His Church for three years now.

 

Blessings,

 

Maurice

 

And Then They Repented? Reflections On Ted Haggard, Repentance & Revival

 

Recent Events & Two Lessons

 

The Evangelical Christian community was dealt a body blow this past week by accusations leveled against Ted Haggard, President of the National Association of Evangelicals and Pastor of the 14,000 member New Life Church in Colorado, Springs. The accusations involved drug use and a homosexual tryst with a Denver male prostitute over a span of nearly 3 years. In a letter read to his former congregation on Sunday Pastor Haggard admitted: "The fact is I am guilty of sexual immorality. And I take responsibility for the entire problem. I am a deceiver and a liar. There’s a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I have been warring against it for all of my adult life," My suspicion (and my fear) is that there is probably more to this, and that the Evangelical community and the world at large will probably be subjected, compliments of a hyper-active media, to a form of Chinese water torture as additional details come dripping out. I can "hardly wait" to see what tabloid headlines appear at local supermarket news stands in the coming weeks. As a friend of mine might say to summarize, "This is an ugly pig, and putting lipstick on it won’t help".

 

I do not know Pastor Haggard at all, although I have friends and ministry associates who do and, up til now, have held him in very high regard. I cannot speak to his personal character or behavior. I must leave that to others. I ache and weep for his wife and family who must now walk with him through a valley of personal trial and humiliation that most of us cannot begin to fathom. I refuse to engage in personal recriminations and statements such as "Well, he’s reaping what he sowed" or "He’s a hypocrite and he’s getting what he deserves." While there may be a grain of truth to such statements (we do, indeed, reap what we sow, and God does indeed hate hypocrisy), such statements miss two important truths. First, they miss the truth that the Church of Jesus is an "army" called upon to show mercy toward its "enemies" and compassion towards its wounded. Unfortunately, all too often we are the army which vilifies its "enemies" and shoots its own wounded. For my part, I plan to pray for Ted and for his beleaguered family who, in this night season of their lives, must feel like they are walking through the valley of the shadow of death. Been there. Have a tee-shirt. Nuff said. But there is a second truth that I fear we may miss in the midst of this messy fracas and media feeding frenzy, and it is a truth much larger than Ted Haggard. It’s a truth about God’s call upon His church at this time, and that’s a three-year story I need to briefly unpack.

 

A Message of Repentance

 

Much of what I am about to BRIEFLY relate can be traced through back issues of this newsletter, so I will reference them as I go along, should you want to explore in more detail what I am about to relate in brief. You can find them posted on our newsletter archive page at: www.parousianetwork.org/Back_Issues_of_E_Letter_Update.htm. Three years ago, beginning in October of 2003 (see our October 13, 2003 letter) I began hearing from the Lord that He was calling His Church into a season of profound repentance in preparation for Revival. My sense of this calling grew in intensity to the point that I felt led to announce a season of prayer, fasting and repentance for revival among Churches in the greater Spokane area (see our newsletter for January 13, 2004). We prepared audio messages, radio programs, printed materials and more and sent some 200 packets to prominent local area churches encouraging them to participate. The response was, well, "tepid" at best ("tepid" sounds more generous than "non-existent"). Following this season I was asked by Paul Kaak (of Organic Greenhouses) if I thought this was a message for the larger Church in America. Not feeling called as a "prophet to the nations" I felt ill-equipped to answer that question. I summarized this season in an article which can now be found in the Appendix to our House Church Equipping Workbook. Over the year that followed I wondered if God’s call to repentance had waned or if I had "mis-heard." Then, at a prayer conference sponsored by Pastor Ed Cain (the English-Congregation pastor of the Korean Presbyterian Church in Spokane) in October of 2005, the Holy Spirit "surprised" me with a renewed call to the Church in Spokane to repent (yep, same response). I didn’t fully understand what God was saying or doing by this renewed call until February when the Lord took me to Zechariah 1:1-6 and showed me the difference between "easy" repentance and "hard" repentance. He showed me that the Church had ignored and rejected His season of "easy" repentance and was now entering a season of "hard" repentance (see our February 23, 2006 newsletter for details). Feeling that I had "done my duty" I tried over the next few months to set this message aside and concentrate on other things. But once God declares a season, He sees it through to the end, regardless of what we do . . . or don’t do. I had been working on an extended treatment of repentance in the letters to the 7 churches of Asia in Revelation 2-3, but set the study aside this summer in the hope that my involvement was done. Right. Then, in September the Lord surprised me (again) with a strong sense that we were entering a season during which He would answer the "desperate prayers" of His people (see our newsletter for September 18, 2006). What I didn’t know then was how God planned to bring His church to a point of desperation - you see, it takes desperate people to pray desperate prayers. And that’s where Ted Haggard enters in to what God is doing right now.

 

Repentance And God’s Megaphone

 

C.S. Lewis said that pain is God’s megaphone by which He gets the attention of a deaf world. The same "principle of pain" applies to a deaf Church. Just how "deaf" we are can often be measured by the level of pain God must inflict (or allow) in order to get our attention. For the past three years God has been vying for the attention of His Church in Spokane, calling it to seek Him in genuine repentance and humility. But His message has been hindered by a profound spiritual deafness masked by a pseudo-boldness which seeks to proclaim its way into revival while by-passing God’s pathway - the "road-not-taken" which leads through the low-places of personal humility, confession of sin and repentance. I am only beginning to appreciate that this message is much larger than Spokane. It is God’s call upon His greater Church in America, and His necessary precursor to genuine revival. The Holy Spirit simply will not fill dirty, un-repentant vessels. So is it any surprise that He is beginning to "wash the dishes"?

 

Several weeks ago my wife, Gale, heard a word during her devotions that "things hidden in darkness are going to be revealed". A week ago, who could have imagined the events of the past week and the "dark" things which have come to light. I have literally had local Christian leaders tell me that they have nothing to repent of and don’t see the need for this message. I hope the events of the past week have helped change that attitude. I hope so, but I’m not overly optimistic. But if not, more is coming. We are now in a season of "hard" repentance for the Church, during which delay will only intensify what unfolds. God is indeed preparing to answer the desperate prayers of desperate believers. And if need be, He will increase the level of our desperation by turning up the volume of His divine but painful megaphone until He overcomes our deafness and achieves a broken, contrite, humble and repentant people who have ears and can hear what the Spirit is saying to the church.

 

On Friday & Saturday, November 17 & 18 several churches in Spokane are sponsoring a 24 Hour worship gathering at a local church. If I had a voice in the leadership of this event (which I don’t), I would encourage, even insist, that the event not focus on "cheap worship." Cheap worship is worship which doesn’t cost us anything. Most contemporary worship is "cheap" by this definition. There is no price tag attached other than the cost of time spent. Repentance, on the other hand, is "expensive" worship. It costs us something, things like our pride, our religious, pseudo-spiritual veneer, the confession of hidden sins, and more. But there is also a "cheap" form of repentance that must also be avoided as well. It is the "staged" repentance of "Christian-political-correctness." In "Cheap" repentance, aspiring leaders who have never met and do not know (much less sinned against) their stage counterparts to whom they are assigned and scheduled to repent, shed pseudo-tears as they lead pseudo-penitents through the formalized steps of pseudo-repentance in the hope that the pseudo-deities of their imagination will somehow be pleased with their pseudo-offerings. Can "representational" or "identificational" repentance be effective and meaningful? Yes, of course, but only when it is spontaneous, genuine and Holy Spirit driven. But not as an agenda item on the evening’s program. Repentance is not a spectator sport to be performed by some and enjoyed by others. Confessing someone else’s sin as if it were our own is far easier than asking God to reveal the secret sins and strongholds of our own heart. Jeremiah the prophet understood this dilemma when he declared: "The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; Who can understand it?" Then came the divine answer: "I, the LORD, search the heart, I test the mind, even to give to each man according to his ways, according to the results of his deeds." In genuine repentance we submit the deceitfulness and sickness of our individual hearts to God who searches and tests all things, and Who reveals to us those things which we have hidden from men, from God . . . and even from ourselves.

 

Allow me for a moment, Chorus like, to work upon your thoughts and provoke you to the edge of repentance with a few promptings for your consideration:

 

1. We could begin by repenting to the Lord for our lukewarm and unrepentant spirits. Sometimes obedience begins with nothing more than a willingness to be willing to obey. Let’s begin by asking God’s forgiveness for the pride of our own hearts which prevents us from even being willing to obey.

 

2. We could move on to asking God to forgive us for seeking to take spiritual ground from the enemy, when the enemy holds that same ground in us. Ted Haggard was a leader in the fight in Colorado to ban Gay marriage. But you cannot lead a fight against sexual impurity when there is sexual impurity in your own life. You cannot cast down a spiritual stronghold while at the same time walking in it. As a Church, we could begin by repenting before the Lord for walking in the very sins and spiritual strongholds which we condemn in others.

 

3. We could take another step toward genuine humility and repentance by repenting for seeking political solutions to spiritual problems, rather than seeking spiritual solutions to political (and social) problems. During the Welsh Revival of 1904 British politician (and later Prime Minister) David Lloyd-George noted that six months of the revival had done more to combat drunkenness and alcoholism (a rampant problem among the Welsh coal miners) than the "Temperance" political movement had accomplished in years of effort. When will we understand and embrace the teaching of Scripture and the lessons of revival which combine to demonstrate that God can accomplish more in two years of genuine spiritual awakening and revival than we could accomplish on our own in 20 years of conservative political action.

 

4. We could repent for having not reached out to "the least of these" (Matthew 25:31ff), but instead having sought the favor of the politically and financially powerful.

 

5. We could repent of the religious, controlling spirit of competition and "kingdom building" which seems to characterize so much of what we do in Church and ministry today.

 

6. Finally, we could make our repentance truly "biblical" by repenting of those same sins which Jesus rebuked among the Churches of Asia, and which the Lord, through John, recorded for our warning and instruction. We could repent of working hard but loving little as in Ephesus. We could repent of tolerating the stumbling block of compromise, as in the Church at Pergamum. We could repent of tolerating spirits of false authority and witchcraft among leaders as in the Church of Thyatira. We could repent of having fallen asleep and living off our spiritual reputation of by-gone days like the Church of Sardis, and we could repent of complacency, lukewarmness and lack of zeal as in the Church of Laodicea. But that would mean we actually wanted to do something about these sins, and that would be "expensive worship."

 

"And Then They Repented"?

 

O.K., it’s time to wrap things up. There is more that I could share, but there is a limit to what people can bear. In summary, I believe we have, indeed, entered a season of "hard" repentance for the Church both in Spokane and in our nation. God is now using His divine megaphone of pain to get the attention of a deaf church, increasing its sense of "desperation" and calling it to repentance. The pathway to revival leads through the valley of humility, brokenness, confession and repentance. Are we willing to walk through it? Or are we still looking for ways around it? Let me leave you with a starting place for your personal devotions. The following prayer of confession was penned by John Wesley some 250 years ago and has lost none of its significance over the years. Start here, make it your own, and then ask the Holy Spirit to take you deeper into the valley of repentance. Don’t be afraid. The weeping of genuine repentance may last for the night, but a shout of joy comes in the morning.

 

"Let him who has an ear hear what the Spirit is saying to the Churches."

 

John Welsey’s Prayer of Confession

 

Forgive them all, O Lord: our sins of omission and our sins of commission;

The sins of our youth and the sins of our riper years;

The sins of our souls and the sins of our bodies;

Our secret and our more open sins;

Our sins of ignorance and surprise, and our more deliberate and presumptuous sin;

The sins we have done to please ourselves and the sins we have done to please others;

The sins we know and remember, and the sins we have forgotten;

The sins we have striven to hide from others,

And the sins by which we have made others offend.

Forgive them, O Lord, forgive them all for His sake,

Who died for our sins and rose for our justification,

And now stands at thy right hand to make intercession for us,

Jesus Christ our Lord.

by John Wesley

 

Special Parousia Potluck & Evening of Listening & Repenting (AKA "A Gathering Of Angels . . . And A Time To Dance")

 

Here's Your Chance To Escape (Unsubscribe - Although Why In The World You Would Want To Is Beyond Me!)

 

As I shared in our last letter we have been changing and up-grading computers. One of the "side effects" was that all of our e-mail addresses got combined into one mondo list. Yep, that includes people who had previously unsubscribed from the e-letter but were still being carried in our "general" contact list. So, thanks for your patience (no irate e-mails threatening to contact our ISP, please) and now is your big opportunity to rid yourself of this weekly source of conviction and irritation. To UNSUBSCRIBE please type UNSUBSCRIBE in the Subject line of a blank e-mail (without any nasty & disparaging comments about my dog's pedigree) and send it to: newsletter@parousianetwork.org. Conversely, you can SUBSCRIBE by typing SUBSCRIBE in the Subject line of a blank e-mail and sending it to newsletter@parousianetwork.org.