Here’s a thought for today from Selwyn Hughes, an expert on revival :

“Our nation needs God—that is for sure.  We are slipping into apostasy, sin is rampant and rife, young people have no clear ethical guidelines, postmodernism rules in our colleges and universities, moral absolutes no longer prevail, so many things are being undermined. How can we reach them is there is no revival?  How can things change?

We can’t look to the nation to correct itself morally on its own.  The answer to our morality does not lie entirely in the chambers of government but in the house of God.

We have watched our country slipping back for a generation.  And without doubt complacency and lukewarmness gnaw at the door of the church. It is a lot to believe that humility, believing prayer, radical repentance, and cutting out everything that God does not want in our lives can change things, but not to believe it would make God a liar.

God longs for revival more than we do.  “Return to me, and I will return to you,” he said in Malachi 3:7.

Let’s not settle for the spiritual status quo: a mediocre, weak, and anemic brand of Christianity, when God wants to make available to us the same kind of power that energized the early church.  Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones said on one occasion that the Christian church is like a sleeping giant. If that is so, then it is time for it to wake up.

To absorb ideas about revival costs nothing, but to enter into revival costs everything—our time and changes in our behavior.  We shall be very guilty if, having come to understand revival and be convinced of its need, we then do nothing about it.  Let us report for duty in the battle for our nation’s soul.”

excerpted from pages 76 and 82-84 of:

Hughes, Selwyn. Why Revival Waits (Nashville, TN: Broadman &  Holman, 2005.)