Revival Generation
The ripple effect of the Asbury revival is evidencing itself across our land and around the world.
The final public service at Hughes chapel led to services restricted to students under the age of 25 years. Regardless of what else these students may be labelled, they are the revival generation.
This is not to suggest that older Christians have not prayed fervently for the revival which God, in his wisdom, chose to start at a university chapel service rather than a seniors’ center or a regular church service anywhere in America.
These students, students everywhere, are the revival generation in America because they do not have the perception of the wall that I spoke of in my previous blog. These students know they do not live in the greatest country on earth. While, for the most part, they are grateful for their freedom, they don’t feel free. They feel the anxiety, the tension, the division, and the sinfulness of the lost generation that spawned them. And they feel it shouting in their faces like no other generation before them.
The second step in healing our land, is in praying for, and affirming our youth. We cannot pray effectively without humility, so the first step has to be in tearing down the wall of arrogance that America built long before the border wall was ever a thing. Too often we blame the generation coming behind us for their delinquency and erratic behavior. The truth is, we don’t live with their uncertainty, their anxiety, their culture. Our young people are not strong because we have not made them strong. Our culture has created a generation of lost and lonely young people who need safe spaces and handouts in order to do nothing more than survive. But we have also created a generation of seekers. And in the words of the script of the recent movie, “The Jesus Revolution,” they are looking for all the right things. They are just looking in all the wrong places.
The hippie generation looked for their freedom in drugs and sex.
Today’s generation is looking for freedom in alternative sexual expression and entitlement.
The message has not changed. Jesus came so that our young people may have life and have it more abundantly than any kind of self expression offers.
The question also remains the same. Have we be faithful to pass the light of Jesus’ love and grace to the next generation? Or is that door, like Lonnie Frisbee said of Chuck Smith’s church door, closed to them?
Prayer
Father, sometimes as the older generation, it is easy for us to direct blame and frustration with the next generation. Help us to embrace “hippies” in a way that entices them to find Jesus in their search for meaning in life. Amen