More Messages from a Sinner

 

Let me ask you a question.

Have you anytime in the past couple of months said, "We need a revival!"?

Seriously, think about it. I want you to look around right now. I know you have said it. Oh, you over there, you won't stop talking about it. You bring it up in the foyer, you bring it up before Sunday school, you bring it up while we are drinking that lukewarm coffee in the back, while at work, driving in your car, waiting in line at the grocery store. Honestly, I am almost kinda tired of hearing it from you. But the point is, every single one of us has said it at some point. We bow our heads, or we look up at the ceiling, and we sigh, saying, "Lord, we need a revival."

Well, let me for one moment be Brother Raphael. Now, if you have been around Courts of Praise Community Church for any length of time, you know exactly who Brother Raphael is. He is our interpreter. He is the man who stands there translating from Spanish to English and English to Spanish. When someone comes to us and they only speak Spanish, we need someone to make sure that we actually understand each other. We do not want a Tower of Babel thing going on right here in the sanctuary. We do not need everyone babbling in different directions, completely confused, nodding their heads while having absolutely no clue what the other person is saying. So Brother Raphael takes that upon himself, using one of his many beautiful gifts, to help us communicate and understand each other. He bridges the gap. He makes the foreign feel familiar.

Now, I am not going to stand up here and interpret Spanish to English today. I am going to do something a little different. I am going to interpret English to English. You might think that sounds ridiculous. Why would anyone need to interpret English to English? We all speak the language, do we not? Well, yes and no. The truth is, sometimes we hear things and we do not understand them completely. We do not take them to heart. We do not fully grasp the meaning, or we do not let them fill our spirit with the true weight of what the words actually mean. We just hear "we need a revival" and we kinda nod along and go, "yeah, we need a revival." It becomes a churchy catchphrase. It becomes a religious bumper sticker that we slap onto our conversations when things look a little bleak. But when you say "we need a revival," do you actually know what is coming out of your mouth? What you are really saying is this:

"Ohhhhh Lord, it is messed up down here!"

That is the real translation. When you cry out for revival, you are actually screaming: "Lord God almighty, you have to intervene in this nastiness!"

You are looking at the world around you, and you are realizing that the state of our culture, the state of our community, and maybe even the state of our own homes is completely unsatisfactory. It is substandard, unacceptable, and shoddy. It is all of that and more. Honestly, if we are being completely real with each other, it is actually much worse than you think. But all of us can not only see it, we can feel it in our spirit. We feel the weight of the air changing. We know the time of Jesus' mighty and triumphant return is soon. We can feel the labor pains of creation. So now that my interpreter time is up, let us talk about the flip side of this real quick.

The Words Used to Shake Us

Look at all those words I just used to describe the state of the world: garbage. Have you noticed something interesting about that? This is the very label used by the wicked to shame Christians into accepting their perversions. They want to turn the tables on us. When we stand up for biblical truth, when we say that God created them male and female, or when we say that marriage is a sacred covenant between one man and one woman, the world looks at us and calls us substandard. They tell us our beliefs are inadequate for the modern age. They claim our morality is unacceptable, crummy, and shoddy.

Sometimes these are quiet comments made around the water cooler at work. Sometimes they are underhanded utterances whispered behind our backs in the breakroom. Sometimes they are loud, angry exclamations shouted at school board meetings or plastered across social media, meant to embarrass you and make you crawl into a corner. They want you to feel like a second-rate human being because you believe in an ancient Book. They want to label you a liar, a bigot, or a fool. But what is it really? All those adjectives I just used, what is so bad about being called any of them by a world that is completely lost in the dark?

Let us look at what the Scripture says about this tension. In the book of Galatians, chapter five, verse seventeen, we find the core of the issue:

For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do.

Your spirit craves God. Your spirit was designed by the Creator of the universe to thrive on His presence, to eat His Word, and to breathe His peace. God has always been there. He has not moved. He is not hiding behind a cloud waiting for you to get your act together before He decides to love you again. In fact, He loves you so much that no matter what you do, good or bad, He cannot possibly love you more, and He cannot possibly love you less. His love is not a faucet He turns on and off depending on your behavior; it is a deep artesian well that keeps bubbling up from the bedrock of eternity, cold and clean, even when you try to dump dirt over the opening. But even though God has not moved, something else happens. Your spirit goes deaf.

How does a spirit go deaf? It happens when your spirit turns its back on the Father. Your spirit stops listening to the whisper of the still, small voice, and instead, it starts listening to the loud, demanding whispers of the flesh. Whether those whispers are coming from you internally, through your own doubts and lusts, or whether they are coming from someone else externally, through the culture, the media, or your friends, the result is the same. You start tuning out the frequency of heaven to listen to the static of the earth.

In Matthew, chapter twenty-six, verse forty-one, Jesus gives us a warning that we need to tattoo on our hearts:

"Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak."

Let me tell you this: just because you can resist the devil does not mean you should hang out with him. If you do not want temptation to follow you home, do not act like you are interested in what it is selling. We play these dangerous games where we try to see how close we can get to the edge of the cliff without falling over. We want to dip our toes in the muddy water of the world while keeping our Sunday clothes perfectly clean. It does not work that way. The flesh is weak, and the moment you start entertaining the whispers of the world, your spiritual hearing begins to fade. Before you know it, you are completely deaf to the things of God, and you are wondering why your life feels so crummy and substandard.

The War Within Our Hearts

We need to understand that this battle between the flesh and the spirit is not a polite disagreement. It is a brutal, daily war. It is a civil war taking place inside the borders of your own heart. On one side, you have the Spirit of God, who has sealed you for the day of redemption and is constantly pulling you toward holiness, prayer, worship, and selflessness. On the other side, you have the flesh, which is your old nature, your carnal desires, and your selfish ambition. The flesh wants what feels good right now. It wants comfort, it wants recognition, it wants control, and it wants to satisfy every passing urge without regard for the consequences.

The problem is that we live in a culture that worships the flesh. Every commercial, every movie, every song, and every social media feed is telling you to follow your heart, feed your desires, and do whatever makes you happy. They tell you that you are the king of your own life. And because we are surrounded by this message twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, we start to absorb it. We start to believe that our primary goal in life is to avoid discomfort and maximize our own pleasure. We become soft. We become spiritually lazy.

When we get to this state, our spirit goes deaf. We can sit in a church service with our hands lifted, we can sing the songs, we can listen to the sermon, but nothing is penetrating. The seed of the Word of God falls on hard, packed soil. We have allowed the noise of the world to drown out the voice of the Holy Spirit. We are more worried about our retirement accounts, our social status, and our weekend plans than we are about the condition of our souls. We have traded the eternal glory of God for the cheap, plastic trinkets of this world.

Let us look at another scripture that describes exactly where we are today. In the second letter to Timothy, chapter four, verse three, the apostle Paul writes:

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions.

Does that not sound exactly like the world we are living in right now? People do not want to hear the truth anymore. They do not want to hear about repentance, holiness, or the cross. They want teachers who will tickle their itching ears. They want to be told that they are doing great, that God just wants them to be rich and happy, and that there is no need to worry about sin because God is too loving to judge anyone. They want a customized, designer gospel that fits their lifestyle without requiring them to change a single thing. They want a savior who will rescue them from their troubles but leave them completely in charge of their choices. They want Jesus to be their firefighter to save them from hell, but they do not want Him to be the Lord of their daily lives.

But when you have itching ears, you stop listening to the truth. You start searching for any voice that will validate your compromise. You will find a podcast, a book, or a church that tells you that your pet sin is not actually a sin, that it is just a struggle, or a personality trait, or something you cannot help. You will surround yourself with people who will nod and say, "Oh, it is okay, everyone does it." But deep down, in the quiet moments when the noise fades, your spirit still knows the truth. Your spirit knows that you are starving. Your spirit knows that you have traded the bread of life for the husks of the swine.

Lost in the Noise of the World

How did we get here? How did we become so disconnected from the Almighty? The truth is, we get lost in the noise of everyday life. We do not usually wake up one morning and decide to abandon our faith. It is not a sudden, dramatic leap off the cliff. It is a slow, gradual drift. It is a leak. You do not notice it at first, but day by day, week by week, you are losing pressure. You are losing your spiritual passion.

We get so caught up in the details of survival that we forget who we belong to. We worry about the price of gas. We stress over inflation and the rising cost of groceries. We get anxious about our jobs, our health, and our family dynamics. We spend hours scrolling through the news, letting our hearts be filled with anger, fear, and worry about things we cannot control. We spend our evenings watching television shows that mock the very values we claim to hold dear, and then we wonder why we feel so empty when we close our eyes at night.

We have allowed the horizontal distractions of this world to completely block our vertical view of God. We are so busy looking at the storm, looking at the waves, looking at the wind, that we have completely lost sight of the One who is standing on the water, telling us to come. We have let the anxieties of this life choke out the Word of God in our hearts, leaving us fruitless and exhausted.

Think about your daily routine. How much time do you spend feeding your flesh versus feeding your spirit? You will spend hours eating meals, watching screens, talking about sports, and worrying about your finances. But how much time do you spend in the presence of the Lord? How much time do you spend reading His Word, not just as a duty, but as a desperate cry for nourishment? How much time do you spend in quiet, uninterrupted prayer, listening for His voice instead of just listing your demands?

We have become a generation of spiritually malnourished believers. We are trying to run a marathon on a diet of cotton candy and soda pop. We are trying to fight a spiritual war with plastic swords and cardboard shields. We have no power, no authority, and no joy because we have cut ourselves off from the source of our strength. We are trying to survive on yesterday's manna, and it has gone bad. We need a fresh touch. We need a modern-day intervention. We need a real, deep, heart-level revival.

Redefining Revival

This brings us to the core of the problem. We do not understand what revival actually is. We think revival is a series of meetings scheduled on the church calendar from Sunday to Wednesday. But let me tell you, it is not about a flashy guest speaker getting everyone excited for a few days, or just some emotional highs and crying at the altar. True revival is a deep, supernatural restoration. It is the breath of God coming back into bones that have gone dry and dusty. It is the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit reclaiming territory in your soul that you had surrendered to the world, restoring your first love and putting a fire back in your bones that cannot be put out when the Monday morning routine hits.

True revival is not an event. It is a restoration of spiritual passion and vitality. It is a resurrection of that which was dead or dying. It is the moment when you look at your life and say, "I am done living in this halfway house of faith. I am done playing games with God. I want Him, and I want Him more than anything else in this world." It is a return to your first love.

Revival is the moment we stop letting the Holy Spirit be the janitor of our lives and start letting Him be the CEO. Think about that for a second. How do we treat the Holy Spirit? Most of the time, we treat Him like a night shift janitor. We go out and make a total mess of our lives. We make bad decisions, we yield to temptation, we speak words of anger, we harbor bitterness, and we get ourselves into a giant, sticky mess. Then, when everything is falling apart and the floor is covered in garbage, we run to the altar on Sunday and say, "Holy Spirit, please clean this up! I made a mess again. Get your broom, get your mop, and make it look nice before Monday morning."

And because He is merciful and kind, He does clean it up. He forgives us, He heals us, and He restores us. But then what do we do? On Monday morning, we lock Him back in the janitor's closet. We tell Him, "Thank you for cleaning up my mess, but I will take it from here. I am going to run my business, I am going to manage my family, I am going to choose my entertainment, and I am going to handle my money my way. Do not call me, I will call you when I spill something else."

That is not Christianity. That is a cheap imitation. If you want to experience real revival, you have to hand over the keys to the building. You have to step down from the big desk. You have to stop treating the Holy Spirit like a cleanup crew and start treating Him like the Chief Executive Officer of your entire existence. You have to say, "Lord, you run this place. You make the decisions. You set the budget. You choose the direction. If you say go, I go. If you say stop, I stop. If you tell me to cut something out of my life, it is gone immediately. I am no longer in charge of me."

When you make that shift, everything changes. You stop living in a constant cycle of sin, regret, cleanup, and repeat. You start walking in the power, peace, and authority of the Holy Spirit. You start seeing the fruit of the Spirit manifest in your daily life: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. You do not have to work yourself up into an emotional frenzy to feel God's presence because He is living and reigning inside of you every single second of the day.

Identifying the World's Distractions

If we want to see this kind of revival in our lives, we have to do some serious housecleaning. We have to identify the worldly distractions that are keeping us from God. We have to look at our lives through the lens of eternity and ask ourselves what we are actually building. What are we spending our time, our energy, and our resources on?

Let us look at some practical areas where we get off track. Think about how we raise our families. We live in a society that is absolutely obsessed with achievement, performance, and success. We push our children to excel in everything. We sign them up for travel sports, music lessons, tutoring, and advanced placement classes. We fill their schedules to the absolute brim, leaving no time for rest, no time for family dinner, and certainly no time for church or spiritual development.

We will skip church services for a soccer tournament without a single second thought. We will spend thousands of dollars on sports equipment and coaching, but we will not invest a dime in our children's spiritual growth. We are more concerned about our child's education, their athletic performance, and their future career than we are about the condition of their soul. We want them to have a great resume for college, but we do not care if they are spiritually bankrupt. We are training them to worship the gods of this world: success, money, and popularity. And then, when they turn eighteen and walk away from the faith, we cry out to God and say, "Lord, why did this happen?" It happened because we showed them by our actions what we truly valued. We showed them that the world was more important than the Kingdom of God.

This is a hard truth, but we need to hear it. We need to stop making excuses for our compromise. We need to stop letting the culture dictate how we live, how we spend our time, and how we raise our children. We need to stand up and say, "As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. We will prioritize the things of God over the things of this world. We will seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and we will trust Him to take care of the rest."

To help you start this process of realignment, I want you to take these simple, practical steps today. Do not wait until tomorrow. Do not wait until next week. Start right now:

1. Spend 15 minutes today in complete silence. Turn off your phone, close your laptop, turn off the television, and find a quiet place where you can be alone with God. Do not go into this time with a long list of requests. Do not start asking Him for things. Instead, go to Him with an open heart and ask Him to "interpret" your current spiritual state. Ask Him: "Lord, where have I drifted? What are the areas of my life where my spirit has gone deaf? What are the noises that are drowning out your voice?" Then, just sit there and listen. Let Him speak to your heart. Let Him show you the truth about where you are.
2. Identify one secular philosophy you have adopted and replace it with Scripture. We all have them. We have all let some worldly ideas creep into our thinking. Maybe it is the idea that you have to look out for number one because nobody else will. Maybe it is the belief that your worth is defined by your performance, your job title, or the size of your bank account. Maybe it is the philosophy that you should do whatever makes you happy, regardless of what God's Word says. Once you identify that worldly thought, look up a scripture that directly refutes it and write it down. Put it on your mirror, put it on your dashboard, put it on your phone lock screen. Every time that worldly thought enters your head, fight it with the truth of the Word of God.

Becoming a Troublemaker for the World

When you start living this way, when you start prioritizing the Spirit over the flesh, something interesting is going to happen. The world is not going to applaud you. They are not going to look at you and say, "Oh, what a wonderful, holy person you are!" No, they are going to look at you like you have lost your mind. They are going to label you with all those negative adjectives we talked about earlier. They will call you narrow-minded, outdated, substandard, and unacceptable. They will call you a jerk, a bigot, and a fool.

And you know what my response to that is?

I am happy to be a jerk in the eyes of the world if it means I am standing in the truth of God. If everyone hates me but God loves me, His opinion is the only opinion of me that I really care about. I do not care what the world thinks of me. I do not care about their labels, their judgments, or their approval. Their opinion cannot save my soul, it cannot heal my body, and it cannot give me eternal life. Only God can do that. Why should I spend my life trying to please a dying world that is headed for destruction when I could spend my life pleasing the King of kings who holds my eternity in His hands?

We need to become spiritual troublemakers for the world. We need to stop trying to blend in. We need to stop trying to be so polite and comfortable that we never offend anyone with the truth. The gospel of Jesus Christ is offensive to the flesh. It is offensive to a culture that wants to believe it is its own god. When you stand up for biblical truth, you are going to ruffle some feathers. You are going to make people uncomfortable. And that is exactly what we are supposed to do. We are supposed to be salt and light. Salt stings when it hits a wound. Light exposes the things that are hidden in the dark. If we are not stinging, and if we are not exposing, then we are not doing our job.

Think about the early church in the book of Acts. When the apostles went into a city to preach the gospel, the people did not say, "Oh, look, some nice religious people have arrived to share some positive thoughts." No, they cried out, "These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also!" They were known as troublemakers. They were known as people who disrupted the status quo, who challenged the cultural norms, and who refused to bow down to the idols of their age. They were willing to be beaten, imprisoned, and killed for the sake of the name of Jesus.

Where is that spirit today? Where are the believers who are willing to turn the world upside down? We have become so focused on being liked, being accepted, and being relevant that we have lost our power. We have traded our prophetic voice for a seat at the world's table. We want to be cool, we want to be trendy, and we want to be tolerated. But you cannot be a friend of the world and a friend of God at the same time. The Scripture is very clear about that. James, chapter four, verse four, tells us that friendship with the world is enmity with God. If you want to be a friend of the world, you make yourself an enemy of God.

It is time to make a choice. It is time to draw a line in the sand. Are you going to live for the approval of the crowd, or are you going to live for the audience of One? Are you going to let the whispers of the flesh control you, or are you going to let the power of the Spirit lead you? Are you going to settle for a substandard, crummy, second-rate faith, or are you going to step into the abundant, victorious, powerful life that Jesus died to give you?

The Trap of the "Good Enough" Christian Life

One of the biggest obstacles to a real revival is the trap of the "good enough" Christian life. This is the state where you are not doing anything majorly wrong in the eyes of the world, but you are not doing anything right in the eyes of God. You are just coasting. You attend church services, you do not commit any major crimes, you are relatively polite to your neighbors, and you give a little money to charity now and then. You look at your life and you say, "Well, I am doing better than most people. I am not like those really bad sinners out there. I am good enough."

But God did not call us to be "good enough." He called us to be holy. He did not save us just to make us moral, middle-class citizens who do not cause any trouble. He saved us to make us a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for His own possession, that we may proclaim the excellencies of Him who called us out of darkness into His marvelous light. He saved us to be a revolution. He saved us to be the hands and feet of Jesus in a broken world.

When we settle for a "good enough" faith, we are actually living in a state of lukewarmness. And you know what Jesus says about the lukewarm church in the book of Revelation. He says, "Because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth." That is a terrifying statement. It is better to be completely cold, completely hostile to God, than to be lukewarm. Why? Because a cold person knows they are cold. A person who is lost in deep sin knows they need a savior. But a lukewarm person is blind to their own condition. They think they are rich, prosperous, and in need of nothing, not realizing that they are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.

This is the condition of so many believers today. We are comfortable. We have our air-conditioned churches, our padded seats, our professional worship bands, and our coffee shops in the lobby. We have everything we need to feel good, but we have no power. We have no authority over the enemy. We see no miracles, no deep conversions, and no transformation in our communities. We are just playing church, while the world around us is sliding straight into hell.

We need to stop playing. We need to realize that the stakes are incredibly high. This is not a game. This is a matter of life and death, heaven and hell, eternity and temporary pleasure. Every single day, people are dying without Christ. Every single day, families are being torn apart by sin. Every single day, young people are being swept away by the lies of the culture. And we are sitting in our comfortable pews, worrying about whether the music was too loud or if the sermon went five minutes over.

It is time to wake up. It is time to shake off the slumber of the flesh. It is time to cry out for a real, deep, heart-shaking revival. But remember, revival does not start in the White House, it does not start in the state capitol, and it does not start in the church down the street. It starts in your heart. It starts when you fall on your knees and say, "Lord, do it in me. Clean out my temple. Remove my idols. Break my heart for what breaks yours. Give me a hunger for your presence that cannot be satisfied by anything else."

Overcoming the Common Mistakes in Seeking Revival

As we pursue this revival, we must be careful to avoid some common mistakes that believers often make. These mistakes can stall our spiritual growth and prevent us from experiencing the fullness of what God has for us. By recognizing these traps, we can navigate our spiritual journey with wisdom and clarity.

The first major mistake is treating the Holy Spirit like a janitor rather than a leader. We have already discussed this, but it is worth examining how this plays out in our daily habits. When we only seek God when things go wrong, we are living a reactive faith. We wait for the crisis to hit—the financial collapse, the health scare, the marital breakdown—and then we frantically cry out for prayer and intervention. While God is merciful and will meet us in our crises, this is not how He intended us to live.

The Holy Spirit is not a reactive force; He is a proactive guide. He wants to lead you in your daily decisions so that you can avoid the messes in the first place. He wants to whisper to you to keep your mouth shut when you are about to say something foolish to your spouse. He wants to prompt you to be generous before you get greedy. He wants to lead you away from environments and relationships that will compromise your integrity. When you allow Him to lead, your life becomes characterized by peace and stability rather than constant chaos and cleanup.

The second mistake is focusing on external reformation instead of internal transformation. It is easy to change our outward behavior to look more religious. We can start attending more church events, we can clean up our language, we can post Bible verses on social media, and we can dress the part. But if our hearts are still full of pride, bitterness, lust, and greed, then all of our external changes are nothing more than white paint on a tomb. Jesus called the religious leaders of His day "whitewashed tombs"—they looked beautiful on the outside, but inside they were full of dead men's bones.

True revival is a heart-level work. It begins from the inside out. It starts when we allow the Holy Spirit to perform deep, painful surgery on our souls. It requires us to confess our hidden sins, to forgive those who have hurt us, to release our bitterness, and to surrender our pride. This is not easy work, and it is not comfortable. It hurts to look at the ugly parts of our own hearts. But it is the only way to experience real, lasting change. You cannot have a clean house by just sweeping the dirt under the rug. You have to pull the rug back and get the dirt out.

To help you reflect on your own spiritual state and avoid these traps, I want you to ask yourself these questions honestly. Do not rush through them. Write down your answers. Be completely real with yourself and with God:

• When you say "we need a revival," what specifically are you asking God to change in you? Are you asking Him to change your spouse, your kids, your boss, your pastor, or the politicians in Washington? Or are you asking Him to change your heart, your attitude, your priorities, and your level of devotion? True revival always starts with personal repentance. What is the one area of your life that you are holding back from His control?
• In what ways have you let the "flesh" lead your daily decisions lately? Look at how you spend your time, your money, and your emotional energy. Are your decisions driven by a desire for comfort, convenience, recognition, or security? Or are they driven by a desire to obey God, to serve others, and to advance His Kingdom? Identify the moments where you chose the easy path of the flesh over the narrow path of the Spirit.

The Power of a Surrendered Life

What does a truly surrendered life look like? It looks like a life that is completely dead to self and completely alive to God. It looks like a person who can say, along with the apostle Paul in Galatians, chapter two, verse twenty:

"I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me."

Think about that. A dead person cannot be offended. A dead person cannot be insulted. A dead person does not worry about their reputation, their career, or their financial security. A dead person has no selfish ambition, no pride, and no lust. When you are crucified with Christ, you are dead to all those things. Your old nature is nailed to the cross, and you are given a brand new life. You are filled with the very life, power, and character of Jesus Christ.

When you live this way, you are completely unstoppable. The enemy has nothing in you. He cannot tempt you with the things of this world because you are dead to them. He cannot scare you with persecution or hardship because you have already given up your life. You are no longer living for your own comfort, but for the glory of the One who saved you. You are filled with a supernatural courage that allows you to stand firm in the truth, no matter what the cost.

Imagine a church filled with people who are truly surrendered. Imagine a congregation where everyone has stepped down from the CEO position of their own lives and handed the keys to the Holy Spirit. Imagine a community of believers who are more concerned about the souls of their children than their athletic achievements. Imagine a group of people who are happy to be called fools, jerks, and substandard by the world, as long as they are pleasing to God. What could such a church do? It would turn the community upside down. It would break regional strongholds, heal broken families, deliver the bound, and bring a wave of salvation that would transform the entire culture.

This is what we are asking for when we say we need a revival. This is what we are crying out for. We are not just asking for some good church services. We are asking for a radical, supernatural transformation of our lives, our families, and our community. We are asking God to break our chains, to heal our blindness, to restore our passion, and to send us out as a mighty army to reclaim the ground that the enemy has stolen.

But it starts with you. It starts with a single step of surrender. It starts when you decide to stop listening to the whispers of the flesh and start listening to the voice of the Spirit. It starts when you decide to stop being a "good enough" Christian and start being a fully devoted follower of Jesus Christ. It starts when you say, "Lord, here I am. Clean me, fill me, lead me, use me. I am yours, completely and forever."

Stepping into the Light

As we close this chapter, I want to challenge you to make a decision. Do not let these words just be another message that you hear and forget. Do not let them be something that you nod your head to and then go back to your normal, dry, defeated life. Let them penetrate your heart. Let them stir your soul. Let them provoke you to action.

We are living in a dark, chaotic world. The shadows are growing longer, and the storms are getting fiercer. The world is crying out for answers, but they are looking in all the wrong places. They are looking to politics, to education, to technology, and to entertainment to save them. But none of those things can heal the human heart. None of those things can deliver us from sin and death. Only Jesus can do that.

And Jesus has chosen us to be His witnesses. He has chosen us to be His light in the darkness. But we cannot shine if our lamps are empty. We cannot offer water to a thirsty world if our wells are dry. We must be filled with His Spirit. We must be revived. We must return to our first love and walk in the fullness of His power.

Let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us. Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. Let us stop playing games with God, stop compromising with the world, and stop letting our flesh dictate our choices. It is time to rise up, to stand firm, and to shine like stars in a dark and crooked generation.

I want you to join me in this prayer. If you are ready to surrender, if you are ready to step out of the darkness of the flesh and into the light of the Spirit, let these words be the cry of your heart today:

Heavenly Father, I come to you today as a sinner who is desperately in need of your grace. I look at my life, and I look at the world around me, and I see how messed up it really is. I see how far I have drifted from your presence. I confess that my spirit has gone deaf. I have allowed the noise of this world, the anxieties of life, and the whispers of my own flesh to drown out your still, small voice. I have compromised. I have settled for a "good enough" faith, and I have treated your Holy Spirit like a janitor rather than the leader of my life.

Lord, I ask you to forgive me. I repent of my lukewarmness, my pride, my compromise, and my spiritual laziness. I ask you to perform deep surgery on my heart today. Clean out my temple. Remove every idol, every distraction, and every desire that keeps me from you. I step down from the throne of my own life. I hand you the keys. I ask you, Holy Spirit, to be the CEO of my entire existence. Lead my family, direct my steps, manage my finances, and choose my path. I want to follow you, no matter where you lead.

Give me the courage to stand firm in your truth, even when the world mocks me and calls me substandard. Help me to value your approval over the opinions of the crowd. Let your love be the anchor of my soul. I ask you to stir up a mighty, unstoppable revival within my heart today. Let that revival overflow from me into my family, my church, and my community. Make me a light in the darkness, a city on a hill, and a witness to your saving power. I thank you that you have not moved, that you love me unconditionally, and that you are working in me to bring about your perfect will. I pray all of this in the mighty, triumphant, and holy name of Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior. Amen.