Dry Bones

I am writing about the church of today.

But I do not go how far back the rot goes.

We desperately need revival.

And as I have always stressed, there can be no revival in the absence of death. In short, only the dead can be revived. Or, at the very least, those who know that they are dead.

That is what I want us to look at today.

The church is for the most part dead. Remember the church in Sardis?

And unto the angel of the church in Sardis write; These things saith he that hath the seven Spirits of God, and the seven stars; I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead. Be watchful, and strengthen the things which remain, that are ready to die: for I have not found thy works perfect before God. (Revelation 3: 1, 2)

But I am talking about me and my practice of religion. Whether it also applies to you is not important to me for now.

Allow me to elaborate.

The other day I went with a fellow minister to deal with a crisis that at face value was the result of a sin by a friend and fellow minister who looks up to us, again at face value, very highly.

What we discovered and the discussions we had after it is the reason for this message.

The guy had not just sinned. He had been living in blatant sin for the longest time, time that we had been in fellowship with him, even dealing with crises that we had no idea were related to this life of sin.

How could he hide his sin from us for this long?

How come we had no inkling or suspicion that something like that was happening?

How could we fellowship with him without noticing that something was wrong?

But at the personal level, why did he not seek our spiritual intervention for his temptation and sin? Why could he not trust us with his restoration?

How can we be his spiritual superiors if he can be in blatant sin without us suspecting?

Incidentally, the same guy was attending a church and probably ministering there and they also did not know though he lived amongst them.

I know someone is thinking I am being paranoid for no reason.

But similar things have happened to me enough times to stop this from being an isolated case.

My friend and I looked at many other similar occurrences in the course of our ministry and church involvement and it is very unsettling.

What was our conclusion?

Our discipleship is not transformative

Our ministry model is not working

Our fellowship is dead

Why do I say so?

But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin. (1John 1:7)

In short, the church as we know it may not be the church Christ died to redeem.

There is so much sin in the church that we notice it only when it is the leader who is doing it. And even then it is when it affects the image of the organisation.

I am called a radical believer by most because I do not have greys in my understanding and practice of Biblical truth.

I am called too harsh when confronting sin in the body of Christ to the point that I have been kicked out of fellowships and churches because I refused to look the other way when addressing sin issues because that is the way I see it being done in the scriptures and church history.

As such, anybody who has been with me for some time knows my stand on God’s truth.

He will also know that I am delighted to walk with someone growing toward that reality.

I always have room for the floundering toddler growing toward spiritual maturity. Or what is discipleship?

In short, I am a responsible spiritual father and not a pampering grandfather who will overlook blatant breaches because it is the father who should be handling them.

It therefore hits me very hard when my ‘son’ does something so out of character and still continues calling me his father.

No wonder this guy ran off and blocked me when he discovered that I was looking for him. And I was able to get the whole story after he ran off.

But I am talking about the church.

It is important that we look into our recent past to understand what I am saying.

When we took God seriously in our youth in the eighties, most of us came from a church background.

We therefore had enough churchiness to be members of good standing in society before we made that plunge.

Our new commitment was therefore not one from heathenness to the light of Christ but from a veneer of Christianity to an actual commitment to the faith.

Some of us were saved long before making that decision to delve deeper in the faith.

That is why there were terms like a Christian, a saved Christian and a very saved Christian, among other classifications. And those terms were understood to the world of those times.

Our decision for Christ therefore took us from the nominal to the radical believer through that personal decision we had made, many times publicly.

In those times there were clear lines and expectations as to what each group did.

Let me use sex to get my point across.

The difference between the saved and the very saved was in when they first had sex.

The saved had sex before getting married, but only with the person they were getting married to.

The very saved waited for their wedding before getting intimate.

The very saved would boycott the wedding of their brethren if they discovered that they had had sex before their wedding.

They would also do the same if they had gone down the spiritual ladder for a partner since that was clearly a compromise.

We had very few believers who had sex just like that, or simply in pursuit of pleasure with whoever. In fact, even for the nominal believers, a pregnancy almost always necessitated the marriage of the couple involved. And we had no divorces then.

That is why there were rarely any bastards.

Incidentally, nothing has changed about the morality of our generation for the most part.

We are as strict with our faith as we had in our youth.

The problem is with our expectation. It is with our children, biological and spiritual.

Nowadays, the same people who would boycott a friend’s wedding because they had not waited are flooded with grandchildren from their own children who, not only could not wait for marriage before having sex, but are all over having sex however and with whoever for the fun of it. And I have intentionally left out abortions.

I have walked off seminars when a spiritual leader says something like this.

Since they will have sex anyway, let us teach them safe sex and contraception.

That is how low we have sunk.

Churches have stopped having overnight prayers not because they have trashed prayer but because in the morning after such an event, they find condoms all over the church compound.

Churches place CCTV all over the church, not because they are concerned with security but to slow down the sex craze in their young people.

Our children are dressing like harlots and we are not even ashamed of taking them to church dressed that way.

They post sexually suggestive videos on social media and we are unable to do anything about it.

In short, we are scared of using the standard we used on us on our children and spiritual children.

That is our problem.

No wonder marriages are falling apart all around us because we cannot take any stand on issues.

We are like Eli. In fact, we are worse than Eli because he at least tried to talk sense to his children.

We think we are progressive because we are allowing our children to fill our compounds with the offspring from their unrestrained sexual appetite. We think we are accommodating when we teach safe sex to our church youth. We think we are good parents when our children can access X-rated programs on our TV and internet using the internet we have bought.

Whatever happened to the power of God? Whatever happened to the fear of God?

Does it mean that the power God had to keep us pure then has become impotent for our children that we must use the world’s restraints on them?

Does it mean that God has changed His character and nature to accommodate what was an abomination just a few years ago.

I do not want to even scratch the surface on homosexuality because we could not even imagine it. Yet it is a concern for our children and churches.

I am just using the standards we used on ourselves to see how far we have fallen.

We have fallen, not just backslidden.

In fact, we are worse than that.

We want to portray ourselves as right by accommodating intense darkness so that our fading light can still be acknowledged.

We have cooled our passion for Christ and find comfort in allowing the generation after us to sink into oblivion just so that we remain relevant for our dead spirituality.

We are like Lot who may have thought that living right in Sodom was evangelistic until he lost everything, even his own name.

It had to take his uncle’s intercession for him to be saved.

Sadly, that is the game our generation is playing by lowering our expectation on those after us.

And I hope you understand what I mean.

I am talking about us who stuck to the straight and narrow because that is where God starts from.

I am not talking about those who actually backslid; the ones who are believers for the limelight.

I am not talking about the elders whose audition for girls and women to join ‘worship teams’ is done in bedrooms.

I am not talking about spiritual leaders who treat church resources as personal property.

I am not talking about conmen on pulpits. I am not talking about crooks running churches. I am not talking about those who hand over their churches to their wives and children. I am not talking about those who change constitutions so that they do not retire or even take sabbatical leave.

Sadly, many of those characters also have a background of obedience, even radical obedience, in their youth.

It is that radical walk and obedience that qualified them for those positions.

I am leaving them out because everybody, including themselves, know that they are fallen and that it is only that they are unwilling to forsake the bounty from their life of rebellion.

They therefore are under no illusions about their relevance or usefulness in God’s kingdom.

But the ones living right and have solid doctrine are unable to see their fall because they do not look at their faith beyond their generation. And I am one of them.

I feel this is what God is saying to us.

Will we go back to the point at which we fell?

Will we ask God to lead us back to our fire days when death was more preferable than compromise?

Will we ask God to rekindle our fire for Him and His revelation?

Will we pray that God brings revival to our hearts?

Will you also pray for me?

I need God to rekindle that fire in me so that I stop becoming like the Pharisees who also had the right doctrine and conduct yet were far from Christ’s kingdom.

Please pray for me.