"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
