Chapter 6 THE WORK OF GOSPEL RENEWAL

We have talked about the need for gospel renewal and the essence of the gospel in revival and renewal, and now we will look at the work of gospel renewal — the practical ways and means by which the Holy Spirit brings lasting change to the lives of individuals and to congregations.

We will also focus in more detail on one of these means — the work of preaching — and examine several signs that give evidence of gospel renewal.

THE MEANS OF GOSPEL RENEWAL

While the ultimate source of a revival is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit ordinarily uses several “instrumental,” or penultimate, means to produce revival.

EXTRAORDINARY PRAYER

To kindle every revival, the Holy Spirit initially uses what Jonathan Edwards called “extraordinary prayer” — united, persistent, and kingdom centered. Sometimes it begins with a single person or a small group of people praying for God’s glory in the community. What is important is not the number of people praying but the nature of the praying. C. John Miller makes a helpful and perceptive distinction between “maintenance” and “frontline” prayer meetings. Maintenance prayer meetings are short, mechanical, and focused on physical needs inside the church. In contrast, the three basic traits of frontline prayer are these:

  1. A request for grace to confess sins and to humble ourselves
  2. A compassion and zeal for the flourishing of the church and the reaching of the lost
  3. A yearning to know God, to see his face, to glimpse his glory

These distinctions are unavoidably powerful. If you pay attention at a prayer meeting, you can tell quite clearly whether these traits are present. In the biblical prayers for revival in Exodus 33; Nehemiah 1; and Acts 4, the three elements of frontline prayer are easy to see. Notice in Acts 4, for example, that after the disciples were threatened by the religious authorities, they asked not for protection for themselves and their families but only for boldness to keep preaching! Some kind of extraordinary prayer beyond the normal services and patterns of prayer is always involved.

GOSPEL REDISCOVERY

Along with extraordinary, persistent prayer, the most necessary element of gospel renewal is a recovery of the gospel itself, with a particular emphasis on the new birth and on salvation through grace alone. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones taught that the gospel emphasis on grace could be lost in several ways. A church might simply become heterodox — losing its grip on the orthodox tenets of theology that under gird the gospel, such as the triune nature of God, the deity of Christ, the wrath of God, and so on. It may turn its back on the very belief in justification by faith alone and the need for conversion and so move toward a view that being a Christian is simply a matter of church membership or of living a life based on Christ’s example. This cuts the nerve of gospel renewal and revival.

But it is possible to subscribe to every orthodox doctrine and nevertheless fail to communicate the gospel to people’s hearts in a way that brings about repentance, joy, and spiritual growth. One way this happens is through dead orthodoxy, in which such pride grows in our doctrinal correctness that sound teaching and right church practice become a kind of works-righteousness. Carefulness in doctrine and life is, of course, critical, but when it is accompanied in a church by self-righteousness, mockery, disdain of everyone else, and a contentious, combative attitude, it shows that, while the doctrine of justification may be believed, a strong spirit of legalism reigns nonetheless. The doctrine has failed to touch hearts.

Lloyd-Jones also speaks of “defective orthodoxy” and “spiritual inertia.”$ Some churches hold to orthodox doctrines but with imbalances and a lack of proper emphasis. Many ministries spend more time defending the faith than propagating it. Or they may give an inordinate amount of energy and attention to matters such as prophecy or spiritual gifts or creation and evolution. A church may become enamored with the mechanics of ministry and church organization. There are innumerable reasons that critical doctrines of grace and justification and conversion, though strongly held, are kept “on the shelf.” They are not preached and communicated in such a way that connects to people’s lives. People see the doctrines — yet they do not see them. It is possible to get an “A” grade on a doctrinal test and describe accurately the doctrines of our salvation, yet be blind to their true implications and power. In this sense, there are plenty of orthodox churches in which the gospel must be rediscovered and then brought home and applied to people’s hearts. When this happens, nominal Christians get converted, lethargic and weak Christians become empowered, and nonbelievers are attracted to the newly beautified Christian congregation.

One of the main vehicles that sparked the first awakening in Northampton, Massachusetts, was Jonathan Edwards’s two sermons on Romans 4:5 (“Justification by Faith Alone” in November 1734. And for both John Wesley and George Whitefield, theprimary leaders of the British Great Awakening, it was an understanding of salvation by grace rather than moral effort that touched off personal renewal and made them agents of revival.

GOSPEL APPLICATION

How do we bring the gospel home to people so they see its power and implications? This can take place in a church in several ways. First, a church recovers the gospel through preaching. Preaching is the single venue of information and teaching to which the greatest number of church people are exposed. Are some parts of the Bible “better” for gospel preaching than others? No, not at all. Any time you preach Christ and his salvation as the meaning of the text rather than simply expounding biblical principles for life, you are preaching toward renewal. Preaching this way is not at all easy, however. Even those who commit to Christ-centered preaching tend toward inspirational sermons about Jesus, with little application. Realizing that this is an enormous topie to digest, I point you to Bryan Chapell’s Christ-Centered Preaching: Redeeming the Expository Sermon (2nd ed.; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005) for a place to begin your study.

The second way for a pastor or leader to recover the gospel in the church is through the training of lay leaders who minister the gospel to others. It is critical to arrange a regular and fairly intense time of processing these gospel renewal dynamics with the lay leaders of a church. The components of this training include both content and life contact. By “content,” I propose studying elementary material such as D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones’s chapter “The True Foundation” in Spiritual Depression or working through my book The Prodigal God along with the discussion guide,! More advanced materials would include books by Richard Lovelace and Jonathan Edwards (several of which are listed in the sidebar on p. 78).

By “life contact,” I mean finding ways in personal meetings and counseling to help your leaders repent of idols and self-righteousness. Once the gospel “penny drops” and begins its ripple effects, you will have plenty of this type of pastoral work to do. Your leaders can then begin leading groups in which they guide people to the truths in the Bible that have helped them and have changed their lives.

A third way for a church to foster gospel renewal dynamics is to inject an experiential element into its small group ministry or even to form several groups dedicated to it. Many small group meetings resemble classes in which the Bible is studied or fellowship meetings in which people talk about their burdens and needs, help each other, and pray for each other. While these functions are extremely important, we can learn from leaders of the revivals of the past, such as George Whitefield and John Wesley who encouraged people to form groups of four to eight people to share weekly the degree to which God was real in their hearts, their besetting sins, ways God was dealing with them through the Word, and how their prayer lives were faring. The Experience Meeting by William Williams is a classic guide to how a Welsh seait or “experience meeting” ran (see sidebar).

A fourth way the gospel becomes applied to people’s hearts in a church is through the most basic and informal means possible — what the older writers simply called “conversation.” Gospel renewal in the church spreads through renewed individuals talking informally to others. It is in personal conversations that the gospel can be applied most specifically and pointedly. When one Christian shares how the gospel has “come home” to him or her and is bringing about major life changes, listeners can ask concrete questions and receive great encouragement to move forward spiritually themselves. William Sprague writes, “Many a Christian has had occasion… to reflect that much of his usefulness and much of his happiness was to be referred under God… to a single conversation with some judicious Christian friend.”? Sprague states that it is often not so much the actual content of what a Christian says but their gospel-renewed spirit and character that has an impact. Christians must have the infectious marks of spiritual revival — a joyful, affectionate seriousness and “unction,” a sense of God’s presence. 1Q Visible, dramatic life turnarounds and unexpected conversions may cause others to do deep self-examination and create a sense of spiritual longing and. expectation in the community. The personal revivals going on in these individuals spread informally to others through conversation and relationship. More and more people begin to examine themselves and seek God.

QUESTIONS TO GUIDE AN “EXPERIENCE MEETING”
To be admitted to an experience meeting, a prospective member had to answer the following questions in the affirmative:

  1. Are you seeking God with all your heart?
  2. Are you willing to take rebukes, chastening, and instruction from others?
  3. Will you refrain from repeating the confidential things we discuss?
  4. Are you willing to use your spiritual gifts to edify others in the group?
  5. Are you resolved to forsake your idols and inordinate loves?

To spark discussion in the group, these questions were typically asked:

  1. Do you have spiritual assurance of your standing in Christ? How clear and vivid is it?
  2. How does the Holy Spirit bear witness with your spirit that you are his child? Are you conscious of a growing spiritual light within, revealing more of the purity of the law, the holiness of God, the evil of sin, and the preciousness of the imputed righteousness of Christ?
  3. Is your love for Christians growing? Do you find yourself having a less censorious, judgmental spirit toward weak Christians, those who fall, or those who are self-deceived? Have you been cold to anyone?
  4. Is your conscience growing tenderer to convict you of the very first motions of sin in the mind, such as the onset of resentment; worry, pride, or jealousy; an inordinate desire for power, approval, and material comfort; and an over-concern for your reputation? Are you becoming more aware of and convicted about sins of the tongue, such as cutting remarks, rambling without listening, deception and semi-lying, gossip and slander, inappropriate humor, or thoughtless statements?
  5. Do you see signs of growth in the fruit of the Spirit? Can you give examples in which you responded in a new way — with love, joy, patience, honesty, humility, or self-control — in a situation that a year or two ago you would not have?
  6. Are you coming to discern false, idolatrous motives for some of the good service you do? Are you seeing that many things you thought you did for God you are actually doing for other reasons? Are you coming to see areas of your life in which you have resisted the Lord’s will?
  7. Are you seeing new ways to be better stewards of the talents, gifts, relationships, wealth, and other assets that God has given you?
  8. Are you having any seasons of the sweet delight that the Spirit brings? Are you finding certain promises extremely precious? Are you getting answers to prayers? Are you getting times of refreshing from reading or listening to the Word?

A fifth way to do gospel application is to make sure that pastors, elders, and other church leaders know how to use the gospel on people’s hearts in pastoral counseling — especially people who are coming under a deep conviction of sin and are seeking counsel about how to move forward. Sprague shows how the gospel must be used on seekers, new believers, and stagnant Christians alike. l For example, Sprague tells pastoral counselors to “determine… what is his amount of knowledge and his amount of feeling.”12 He tells counselors to help those who have little doctrinal knowledge but much feeling — or little feeling but a good grasp on doctrine — to bring those two things into balance. Sprague advises to look for forms of self-righteousness and works-righteousness and tells how to help people escape them. He also makes a surprisingly up-to-date list of common doubts and problems that spiritual seekers have and gives advice on how to respond to each one. The gospel must be used to cut away both the moralism and the licentiousness that destroy real spiritual life and power.

GOSPEL INNOVATION

We can identify another important factor in movements of gospel renewal — creativity and innovation. Sprague rightly points out that revivals occur mainly through the “instituted means of grace” — preaching, pastoring, worship, and prayer. It is extremely important to reaffirm this. The Spirit of God can and does use these ordinary means of grace to bring about dramatic, extraordinary conversions and significant church growth. Nevertheless, when we study the history of revivals, we usually see in the mix some innovative method of communicating the gospel. The Great Awakening of the eighteenth century adopted two ministry forms that had seldom been used: public, outdoor preaching and extensive small group “society” meetings, In the 1857-1859 New York City revival, massive numbers of people were converted and joined the churches of Manhattan. Yet the most vital ministry form turned out to be lay-led, weekday prayer meetings all around the business district of Wall Street. Many historians have pointed out that the Protestant Reformation in Europe was greatly powered by new uses of a major technological innovation — the printing press.

No revival will completely repeat the experiences of the past, and it would be a mistake to identify any specific method too closely with revivals. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones points to a few sad cases where people who came through the Welsh revival of 1904-1905 became wedded to particular ways of holding meetings and hymn singing as the only way that God brings revival. (This kind of nostalgia for beloved methods abounds yet today.) Instead, while the core means of revival are theological (rediscovery of the gospel) and ordinary (preaching, prayer, fellowship, worship), we should always be looking for new modes of gospel proclamation that the Holy Spirit can use in our cultural moment. As C. S. Lewis noted in The Chronicles of Narnia, things never happen the same way twice, so it is best to keep your eyes open.

PREACHING FOR GOSPEL RENEWAL

Let’s return to our discussion of preaching’s role in gospel renewal, for it can hardly be overemphasized. We’ll begin by looking at five characteristics that define preaching for gospel renewal.

  1. Preach to distinguish between religion and the gospel. We have already laid out much of this imperative in the previous chapter. Effective preaching for gospel renewal will critique both religion and irreligion. It will also address the core problem of idolatry by helping listeners look beneath the level of behavior to their hearts’ motivation to see the way the gospel functions (or does not function) in the human heart.
  2. Preach both the holiness and the love of God to convey the richness of grace. Preaching should not emphasize only God’s judgment, holiness, and righteousness (like moralistic preachers) or emphasize only God’s love and mercy (like liberal preachers). Only when people see God as absolutely holy and absolutely loving will the cross of Jesus truly electrify and change them. Jesus was so holy that he had to die for us; nothing less would satisfy his holy and righteous nature. But he was so loving that he was glad to die for us; nothing less would satisfy his desire to have us as his people. This humbles us out of our pride and self-centeredness yet at the same time affirms us out of our discouragement. It leads us to hate sin yet at the same time forbids us to morbidly hate ourselves.

  3. Preach not only to make the truth clear but also to make it real. We have seen how Paul seeks greater generosity from people by appealing to them to know the grace and generosity of Christ (2 Cor 8). In other words, if Christians are materialistic, it is not merely a failure of will. Their lack of generosity comes because they have not truly understood how Jesus became poor for them, how in him we have all true riches and treasures. They may have a superficial intellectual grasp of Jesus’ spiritual wealth, but they do not truly, deeply grasp it. Preaching, then, must not simply tell people what to do. It must re-present Christ in such a way that he captures the heart and imagination more than material things. This takes not just intellectual argumentation but the presentation of the beauty of Christ.

    For Jonathan Edwards, the main spiritual problem for most Christians is that while they have an intellectual grasp of many doctrines, these are not real to their hearts and thus do not influence their behavior.14 In the case of materialism, the power of money to bring security is more “spiritually real” to people than the security of God’s loving and wise providence. Clear preaching, then, is a means to the end of making the truth more real to the hearts of the listeners than it has been before. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones summarizes it this way:

    The first and primary object of preaching… is to produce an impression. It is the impression at the time that matters, even more than what you can remember subsequently. Edwards, in my opinion, has the true notion of preaching. It is not primarily to impart information; and while (the listeners are taking) notes you may be missing something of the impact of the Spirit. As preachers we must not forget this. We are not merely imparters of information. We should tell our people to read certain books themselves and get the information there. The business of preaching is to make such knowledge live.

  4. Preach Christ from every text. The main way to avoid moralistic preaching is to be sure that you always preach jesus as the ultimate point and message of every text. If you don’t point listeners to Jesus before the end of the sermon, you will give them the impression that the sermon is basically about them — about what they must do. However, we know from texts such as Luke 24:13 - 49 that Jesus understood every part of the Bible as pointing to him and his saving work. This is not to suggest that the author of every biblical passage intentionally made references to jesus but that if you put any text into its full, canonical context, it is quite possible to discern the lines that point forward to Christ.

    For example, in Judges 19, we have the jarring account of a Levite who is surrounded by violent men in an alien city and who, in order to save his own life, offers his concubine (a second-class wife) to them to gang-rape. There is no way to preach this without talking about the fact that this is a horrible, direct contradiction of all that the Bible demonstrates a husband should be. A husband must protect his wife — and beyond that, he is to sacrifice himself for his wife (Eph 5). And how do we know what a true husband should be? Well, the author of Judges doesn’t know it as clearly as we do, but we know what a true husband is when we look at Jesus; Paul writes about this in Ephesians 5. And therefore we must bring the sermon forward to Christ. Only he shows us what husbands should be like, and only when we recognize his saving work can we be free from the fear and pride that makes us bad spouses. This message convicts, but it also gives deep encouragement. We are not trying to desperately earn our salvation by being good spouses; we are applying an accomplished and full salvation to our marriage. We must always turn to Jesus in our sermon because we want to put what the Bible declares in any one particular place into context with what the Bible says about it as a whole. And this journey always leads us through the gospel to Jesus.

    ADDITIONAL READINGS ON REVIVAL,

    BASIC

    Keller, Timothy. The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith. New York: Dutton, 2008.
    Lloyd-Jones, D. Martyn. “The True Foundation.” Pages 23 - 36 in Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cures. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965.

    INTERMEDIATE

    Lloyd-Jones, D. Martyn. Revival. Wheaton, IIl.: Crossway, 1987. Lovelace, Richard F. Dynamics of Spiritual Life: An Evangelical Theology of RenewaL. Downers Grove, Ill: InterVarsity, 1979.

    ADVANCED

    Edwards, Jonathan. The Nature of True Virtue. Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 2003. __Thoughts on the New England Revival: Vindicating the Great Awakening. Carlisle, Pa.: Banner of Truth, 2004. __Religious Affections. Carlisle, Pa.: Banner of Truth, 1961.

    Edwards has numerous other works on revival that are worth examining. See also his sermons “A Divine and Supernatural Light” and “Justification by Faith.”

    Sprague, William B. Lectures on Revivals of Religion. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1958.

    There are, in the end, only two questions to ask as we read the Bible: Is it about me? Or is it about Jesus? In other words, is the Bible basically about what / must do or about what he has done? Consider the story of David and Goliath. If I read David and Goliath as a story that gives me an example to follow, then the story is really about me. It is an exhortation that I must summon up the faith and courage to fight the giants in my life. But if I accept that the Bible is ultimately about the Lord and his salvation, and if I read the David and Goliath text in that light, it throws a multitude of things into sharp relief! The very point of the Old Testament passage is that the Israelites could not face the giant themselves. Instead, they needed a champion who would fight in their place — a substitute who would face the deadly peril in their stead. And the substitute that God provided is not a strong person but a weak one — a young boy, too small to wear a suit of armor. Yet God used the deliverer’s weakness as the very means to bring about the destruction of the laughing, overconfident Goliath. David triumphs through his weakness and his victory is imputed to his people. And so does Jesus. It is through his suffering, weakness, and death that the sin is defeated. This vivid and engaging story shows us what it means to declare that we have died with Christ (Rom 6:1-4) and are raised up and seated with him (Eph 2:5 - 6). Jesus is the ultimate champion, our true champion, who did not merely risk his life for us, but who gave it. And now his victory is our victory, and all he has accomplished is imputed to us.

  5. Preach to both Christians and non-Christians at once. When I first came to New York City in the late 1980s, I realized I had not come to a normal part of the United States. Thirty percent of Manhattan residents said they had “no religious preference” compared with (at the time) 6 percent of U.S. residents. Only 5 percent of Manhattanites attended any Protestant church, compared with 25 percent of Americans. le 1 realized that New York City was, religiously and culturally, more like secular, post-Christian Europe. So I looked at the work of Dr. Lloyd-Jones, one of the great preachers who had labored in London in the mid-twentieth century, and I reread his book Preaching and Preachers. In addition, [listened to scores (eventually hundreds, I think) of his sermon recordings.

I found particularly fascinating the structure he designed for his preaching. Lloyd-Jones planned his evening sermons to be evangelistic, while the morning sermons were intended to instruct and build up Christians. The evening sermons contained direct appeals to people to come to Christ and believe the gospel but were still richly theological and expository. On the other hand, while the morning sermons assumed a bit more knowledge of Christianity, they always returned to the clear themes of sin, grace, and Christ — the gospel. Lloyd-Jones urged his church members to attend both services. While he saw the evening service as an ideal setting to which to bring a nonbelieving friend, he wanted the professing Christians to attend regularly for their own good. Nor was he concerned when nonbelievers showed up regularly at the morning services. In fact, he wrote, “We must be careful not to be guilty of too rigid a classification of people saying, ‘These are Christians, therefore…’ (or) Yes, we became Christians as the result of a decision we took at an evangelistic meeting and now, seeing that we are Christians, all we need is teaching and edification’ I contest that very strongly.”12 I learned these lessons from him: Don’t just preach to your congregation for spiritual Growth, assuming that everyone in attendance is a Christian; and don’t just preach the gospel evangelistically, thinking that Christians cannot grow from it. Evangelize as you edify, and edify as you evangelize.

THE SIGNS OF RENEWAL

Revival occurs as a group of people who, on the whole, think they already know the gospel discover they do not really or fully know it, and by embracing the gospel they cross over into living faith. When this happens in any extensive way, an enormous release of energy occurs. The church stops basing its justification on its sanctification. The nonchurched see this and are attracted by the transformed life of the Christian community as it grows into its calling to be a sign of the kingdom, a beautiful alternative to a human society without Christ.

Often, the first visible sign of renewal is when nominal church members become converted. Nominal Christians begin to realize they had never understood the gospel, experienced the new birth, or entered a living relationship with Christ by grace. Congregations are electrified as longtime church members speak of their conversions, talk about Christ in radiant terms, or express repentance in new ways. These early adopters of renewal stir up other church members into renewal. Soon, “sleepy” Christians also begin to receive a new assurance of and appreciation for grace. They wake up to the reasons they have been living in anxiety, envy, anger, and boredom. They gain a sense of God’s reality in the heart as well as higher, immediate assurances of his love. Along with a new and deeper conviction of sin and repentance — concerning not only major behavioral sins but inner attitudes — they have a far more powerful assurance of the nearness and love of God. The deeper their sense of sin debt, the more intense their sense of wonder at Christ’s payment of it. As a result, they become simultaneously humbler and bolder.

HOW D. MARTYN LLOYD-JONES USED THE GOSPEL

Why use the gospel to edify Christians? D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones gave two reasons. First, we should not “assume that all… who are members of the church are… Christians. This, to me, is the most fatal blunder of all.”1& Second, many people have accepted Christianity intellectually but have never come under the power of the Word and the gospel and therefore have not truly repented. In other words, it is important to always remember that some of your members are not really converted. “One of the most exhilarating experiences in the life of a preacher is what happens when people whom everybody had assumed to be Christians are suddenly converted and truly become Christians. Nothing has a more powerful effect upon the life of a church than when that happens to a number of people.”

Not only have many professing Christians never truly repented and rested in grace; regenerate Christians, in order to grow, need to constantly feel the power of the gospel and rehearse the experience of conversion again and again. Lloyd-Jones adds, “If our preaching is always expository and for edification and teaching it will produce church members who are hard and cold, and often harsh and self-satisfied. I do not know of anything that is more likely to produce a congregation of Pharisees than that.*2Q He also warns against “preaching morality and ethics without the Gospel as a basis.”

Why, however, give nonbelievers fairly theologically “meaty” expositions, as Lloyd-Jones did in his evening services? He makes this observation:
I have often had the experience of people who have been converted, and have then gone on and grown in the church, coming to me some time later and telling me about what happened to them. What they have so often said is, “When we first came to the Church we really did not understand much of what you were talking about.” I have then asked what made them continue coming, and have been told again and again that, “There was something about the whole atmosphere that attracted us… We gradually began to find that we were absorbing truth. It began to have meaning for us more and more…” They had continued to grow in their understanding until now they were able to enjoy the full service, the full message.

Why were his evangelistic sermons not simpler; and why was it possible for people to slowly but surely find Christ through his edification-based sermons? It was because he addressed believers’ questions and problems by always pointing in some way to the truths of the gospel. That way, as believers were edified, nonbelievers could also hear a gospel presentation. What made this such a good practice is that as nonbelievers came to faith they didn’t have to graduate to a whole different service. And they weren’t led to believe they had graduated from the gospel. They might begin coming to the Friday night lectures on theology or Romans, but on Sunday they were able to come to faith and grow in grace through rich expositions of the Bible.

Of course, the church also begins to see non-Christian outsiders converted as people are attracted to the newly beautified church and its authentic worship, its service in the community, and the surprising absence of condemning, tribal attitudes. Christians become radiant and attractive witnesses — more willing and confident to talk to others about their faith, more winsome and less judgmental when they do so, and more confident in their own church and thus more willing to invite people to visit it. The resulting conversions — sound, lasting, and sometimes dramatic — generate significant, sometines even astounding, church growth.

Richard Lovelace describes a phenomenon common to churches before and after awakenings and revivals. Ordinarily, various Christian traditions and denominations tend to strongly emphasize one or two ministry functions while being weaker in others. For example, Presbyterians are historically strong in teaching and doctrine, Pentecostals and Anglicans (in their own ways!) in worship, Baptists in evangelism, Anabaptists in community and care for the poor, and so on. During times of gospel renewal, however, these strengths are often combined in churches that are otherwise one-sided. Churches experiencing gospel renewal find that some of the “secondary elements” — areas that typically fell outside of their primary focus — emerge during gospel renewal.

This change is often first felt in the vibrancy of a church’s worship. When the gospel “comes home” — when both God’s holiness and his love become far more magnificent, real, and affecting to the heart — it leads naturally to a new “God reality” in worship. Irrespective of the mode or tradition, renewed churches worship in a way that is no longer one-dimensional — neither merely emotional nor merely formal. A clear, widely felt sense of God’s transcendence permeates worship services, which edifies believers while also attracting and helping nonbelievers.

In addition, renewed interest in the gospel always piques interest in an expression of biblical theology that is deeply connected to real life. During revival, liberal-leaning churches may grow more biblical, while fundamentalist-leaning churches may grow less sectarian and more focused on the gospel itself rather than on denominational distinctives.

When the gospel comes home — when believers no longer have to maintain their image as competent and righteous — it naturally breaks down barriers that impede relationships and leads to more authentic experiences of community with others. Pretense and evasion become unnecessary. The gospel also creates a humility that makes believers empathetic and patient with others. All of this enables relationships within the church to thicken and deepen. During times of renewal, the distinct countercultural nature of the church becomes attractive to outsiders.

Finally, gospel renewal will produce people who are humbled (and thus not disdainful or contemptuous toward those who disagree with them) yet loved (and thus less concerned about others’ opinions of them). Therefore every believer becomes a natural evangelist. Times of renewal are always times of remarkable church growth, not through membership transfer and “church shopping,” but through conversion. There is also a renewed emphasis on poverty and justice ministries. When Christians realize they did not save themselves but were rescued from spiritual poverty, it naturally changes their attitudes toward people who are in economic and physical poverty. This kind of humble concern is the message of James 1-2 and many other biblical texts. Christians renewed by the gospel render sacrificial service to neighbors, the poor, and the community and city around them.

All of these changes, both within the church and the surrounding community, will eventually have a broad effect on the culture. Gospel-shaped believers who belong to churches that are experiencing gospel renewal often have a deep, vital, and healthy impact on the arts, business, government, media, and academy of any society. The past two decades have produced a far greater acknowledgment that major social justice and social change movements in Britain and the United States — such as the abolition of slavery and the strengthening of child labor laws — had strong roots in the revivals. Because true religion is not merely a private practice that provides internal peace and fulfillment, holiness affects both the private and civic lives of Christians. It transforms behavior and relationships. The active presence of a substantial number of genuine Christians thus changes a community in all its dimensions — economic, social, political, intellectual, and more.

Notice the interdependence of these “secondary elements” flowing naturally from hearts renewed by the gospel. First, many individuals are renewed by the gospel because they are drawn into a church marked by these qualities. Second, the vitality of each factor depends not only on the gospel-renewed heart but also on each of the other factors. They stimulate each other. For example, as Christians give their lives sacrificially for the poor, their neighbors become more open to evangeliam. Deep, rich community could be said to result from gospel evangelism, but just as frequently it is a means to evangelism, because it makes the gospel credible. Often it is not through listening to preaching but listening to friends that brings us home spiritually. Although these factors are mutually strengthening, the specialists and proponents of each element will almost always pit them against the others. Thus, evangelists may fear that a social justice emphasis will drain energy, attention, and resources from evangelism. Social justice advocates, on the other hand, often resist an emphasis on cultural renewal because they maintain that Christians should be out in the streets identifying with the poor rather than trying to influence the elite worlds of art, media, and business. Community-focused leaders often view rapid church growth and evangelistic programs negatively because they do not like programs — they want everything to happen naturally and “organically” Leaders who grasp how the gospel inspires all of these dimensions must overcome these tensions, and we will discuss these dynamics in greater depth in later chapters.

When the dynamics of gospel renewal are not in place, a church may increase in numbers but not in vitality. It may grow but fail to produce real fruit that has lasting results. It will exhibit symptoms of lifelessness. Most or all of the growth will happen through transfer, not conversion. Because no deep conviction of sin or repentance occurs, few people will attest to dramatically changed lives. Church growth, if it does occur, will make no impact on the local social order because its participants do not carry their Christian faith into their work, their use of monetary resources, or their public lives. However, with these gospel renewal dynamics strong in our hearts and in our churches, our lives and our congregations will be empowered and made beautiful by the Spirit of God.

Of all the elements of a Center Church theological vision, gospel renewal may be the single most difficult one to put into practice because, ultimately, we can only prepare for revival; we can’t really bring it about. God must send it. That may discourage those of us who live in a technological society in which we seek to control everything through our competence and will. When we do not see renewal happening, we can get deeply discouraged. But we should not be. Derek Kidner’s commentary on Psalm 126 can help us here. The first three verses of Psalm 126 look back to times of great spiritual flourishing, when the Israelites’ “mouths were filled with laughter” (verse 2) and when all the nations around them said, “The Lord has done great things for them.” But verse 4 tells us that times have changed. The people cry, “Restore our fortunes, O Lord!” Kidner looks closely at the final parts of the psalm: 4 Restore our fortunes, O LORD, like streams in the Negev. 5 Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy. 6 He who goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with him.

Kidner sees two very different pictures of how revival and renewal can come. The first is in verse 4b; it is “all suddenness, a sheer gift from heaven.” Few places are more arid than the Negev, where the dry gulleys become rushing torrents after a rare downpour and can literally turn a desert into a place of grass and flowers overnight 24 This points to times of revival that are sudden and massive, the kind that historians write about. The second picture is in verses 5-6, “farming at its most heartbreaking,” a long and arduous process when the weather is bad and the soil is hard. The image is one of those who, in the absence of rain, still get a harvest through steady, faithful work, watering the ground with their tears if they have no other source of water. It depicts gospel workers who spend years of hard work, often weeping over the hardness of hearts that they see, and who bear little initial fruit.

And yet the psalmist is absolutely certain of eventual harvest — “God’s blessing of seed sown and His visiting of His people.” This is the final note. Kidner says that the modern translations tend to omit the extra words of emphasis in the final verb and therefore miss the psalmist’s pointedness. No matter how long we may wait, nevertheless he that surely goes forth weeping… will surely come home with shouts of joy.”2§ Kidner concludes, “So the psalm, speaking first to its own times, speaks still. Miracles of the past it bids us treat as measures of the future; dry places as potential rivers; hard soil and good seed as the certain prelude to harvest.”

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION AND REFLECTION

  1. Keller writes, “Maintenance prayer meetings are short, mechanical, and focused on physical needs inside the church. In contrast, the three basic traits of frontline prayer are these: a request for grace to confess sins and to humble ourselves; a compassion and zeal for the flourishing of the church and the reaching of the lost; and a yearning to know God, to see his face, to glimpse his glory.” How have you experienced God working through “frontline” prayer? If you do not currently have these prayer times in your church, how can you go about beginning them?
  2. One way to engage in gospel application is by training lay leaders to minister the gospel to others. This involves personal meetings and counseling to help people learn how to repent of their idols and self-righteousness. Does this type of gospel application currently happen in your church? If not, how can you begin training people to apply the gospel? How is ministering the gospel different from other forms of counseling?
  3. Look at the questions in the sidebar on “Questions to Guide an ‘Experience Meeting? “Which of these questions make you uncomfortable? Which ones do you find easiest to engage? Which are personally convicting?
  4. Gospel innovation involves creatively communicating the gospel in new ways. How have you seen an overreliance on a particular communication style or methodology hinder a ministry? Why is it necessary to be innovative? What are some dangers associated with this?
  5. The section titled “Preaching for Gospel Renewal” gives five characteristics that define preaching that leads to renewal. Which of these five do you need to strengthen? How can you incorporate these missing emphases into your preaching?