Posted on

Will It Last?

Last week God rocked our students’ lives. If you were here Sunday, you saw the impact. Engaged students, hands lifted, hearts open, minds changed. As one man said to me, “If you can’t worship God seeing 100 students praising our Lord and Savior, you don’t have a heartbeat! I loved every second.”

So the nagging question is, “Will it last?” It’s a legitimate question. Five weeks from now will these students still be “fired up?” I have a few thoughts.

What do we want to last? If we are looking for emotion to last, the obvious answer is “no.” Emotions come and go, they rise and fall. If we are looking for activity to last, the obvious answer is no. Involvement is an up and down venture–for all of us. So maybe we can’t answer the first question without defining what we want to last.

This morning in my quiet time I read about King Hezekiah’s reforms. I thought about what God did and wondered (and prayed) if this is what began last week at Caswell. Today I discovered that J.D. Greear, Pastor of Summit Church in Durham, blogged about the same Scripture. He talked about 5 marks of an awakening. (jdgreear.com)

  1. Awakening happens when God’s people clean out the junk from their lives (2 Chr 29:3-5).
  2. Awakening happens when God’s people re-center themselves on Scripture (2 Chr 29:25-30).
  3. Awakening happens when God’s people re-center themselves on the gospel (2 Chr 30).
  4. Awakening happens when God’s people devote themselves to intercessory prayer (2 Chr 30:18-27).
  5. Awakening happens when God’s people give extravagantly (2 Chr 31:5-10).

All week I have heard stories about students coming clean, getting up early to get into God’s Word, being gripped by God’s grace in the face of their sin, praying for one another and, in the second service Sunday a student leaned over to me and said, “Can you help me figure out how much my tithe is?”

I honestly don’t know how long this will last, but I absolutely love what God started.

Posted on

Why the Hope of America is Graduating This Weekend

To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings. (1 Corinthians 9:22-23 ESV)

graduationcap-png6b00604c-93dd-4084-a082-5f3d7737e086larger

This week hundreds of students will graduate from McDowell High School–hundreds of thousands from schools across the United States. What could happen if the thousands of Christian students graduating this week showed up on college campuses this fall with an agenda: to rock that campus for Christ. In order to better understand this, let’s step back in time to 1790. J. Edwin Orr, longtime professor at Fuller Seminary, shares this:

In 1790 America had won its independence, but it had lost something as well. In the wake of the Revolutionary War, French infidelity, deism, and the generally unsettled condition of society had driven the moral and spiritual climate of the colonies to an all-time low. Drunkenness was epidemic; profanity was of the most shocking kind; bank robberies were a daily occurrence; and far the first time in the history of the American settlement women were afraid to go out at night for fear of being assaulted.

Surprised! Colleges were seedbeds of apostasy and debauchery. Orr continues:

A poll taken at Harvard revealed not one believer in the whole student body. Conditions on campus had degenerated to the point that all but five at Princeton were part of the “filthy speech” movement of that day. While students there developed the art of obscene conversation, at Williams College they held a mock communion, and at Dartmouth students put on an “anti-church” play.  In New Jersey the radical leader of the deist students led a mob to the Raritan Valley Presbyterian Church where they burned the Bible in a public bonfire. Christians were so few on the average campus and were so intimidated by the non-Christians that they met in secret. They even kept their minutes in code so no one could find out about their clandestine fellowship.

America seemed to be on a hopeless trajectory toward devastation when 1790 happened. Tomorrow we will talk about how a group of students impacted an entire country. Wow!