{ One Hundred Eighty-Six }

"In the tide in history that seems to be inextricably moving towards so much of lawlessness and unrighteousness and injustice, I draw comfort from the fact that God always seems to bring it down to the individual and He says set your house in order first. He said to Nehemiah take the men and put them in front of their own homes, let them build a wall in front of their own homes first. And I am confident today and I say this without any pretense, please hear me, I am absolutely confident today that if the church of Jesus Christ sets her house in order we will see revival break out in this land, I have no doubt about that whatsoever. And how does that begin? It begins in YOUR LIFE and it begins in mine. So the finger can't be pointed there...as much as it pains you and me. I have to look this way and say Ravi, is righteousness and justice from God the foundation of my life? Is God's voice present in my life?  What a wonderful thing when you can say the glory is present. The voice of God is heard.  I want you to follow this argument: If there is darkness...could it be from the dust of the herd running in the wrong direction? Are you and I willing to stand alone if need be and move in the right direction where the darkness dissipates and the light shines brightly? Listen to the words of Malcom Muggeridge: 'The world’s way of responding to intimations of decay is to engage equally in idiot hopes and idiot despair. On the one hand some new policy or discovery is confidently expected to put everything to rights: a new fuel, a new drug, détente, world government. On the other, some disaster is as confidently expected to prove our undoing. Capitalism will break down. Fuel will run out. Plutonium will lay us low. Atomic waste will kill us off. Overpopulation will suffocate us, or alternatively, a declining birth rate will put us more surely at the mercy of our enemies. In Christian terms, such hopes and fears are equally beside the point. As Christians we know that here we have no continuing city, that crowns roll in the dust and every earthly kingdom must sometime flounder, whereas we acknowledge a king men did not crown and cannot dethrone, as we are citizens of a city of God they did not build and cannot destroy. Thus the apostle Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome, living in a society as depraved and dissolute as ours. Their games, like our television, specialized in spectacles of violence and eroticism. Paul exhorted them to be steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in God’s work, to concern themselves with the things that are unseen, for the things which are seen are temporal but the things which are not seen are eternal [1 Cor. 15:58; 2 Cor. 4:18]. It was in the breakdown of Rome that Christendom was born. Now in the breakdown of Christendom there are the same requirements and the same possibilities to eschew the fantasy of a disintegrating world and to seek the reality of what is not seen and eternal, the reality of Christ.'  Spiritual leadership is central. Self aggrandizement is fatal. Obedience to known truth is crucial. Responsibility is personal."

 ~Ravi Zacharias