A Rude Awakening Must Come Before a Great Awakening is Possible
Before a great awakening, there must be a rude awakening. The jolt the American Church needs is far greater than we know. We need a Godsend. Something outside us. Something so far beyond our imagination that we would be dumbfounded by its description.
Two things would shock us to our core: if we knew our true condition before God, and if we knew how close America is to destruction. We need a Godsend.
What does a Godsend look like? A Godsend is disruptive. It exposes falsehood. It speaks truth to power. It does not negotiate its demands. It is supernatural in its origin and execution.
A perfect clue is John the Baptist. “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John” (John 1:6). The Bible even calls him a Godsend!
He is not comfortable or charming. Not a soothing voice or gracious speaker. He is a wrecking ball. His looks, his message, and his demands are radical and offensive to all except “those who hunger and thirst for righteousness” (Matt. 5:6). He upends religion and points to a new order.
Despite all this, vast crowds march to the wilderness to be baptized and hear of the coming messiah. A Godsend carries a message few would consider a winning message.
But what we deem a hard message may actually be the one that will ignite a soul to fall before God. Therein lies our great ignorance of both God and the yearnings of the human heart.
Millions of American Christians assume America is entitled to survival. Let me assure you, the Lord God almighty has not cheapened His majesty to keep us alive.
Think about God. Think of the empires He has seen rise and fall. He has witnessed the destruction of many nations. He has overseen cultures that thought they would never die. Nineveh had a sign that read “the city that will always be.” Nahum the prophet reminded them of the great miracle they saw with Jonah as he foretold their delayed but certain doom. God has seen delusion before. Entitlement has never stopped judgement.
America has an amazing history. We have been spared destruction again and again by divine intervention. However, something has changed. This is the first time our culture started shaking its fist at Almighty God. We have crossed over into moral unchartered waters. We have an enemy we have never faced before—ourselves.
Abraham Lincoln said: “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide.”1 Suicide is a big word.
Suicide happens when life becomes too painful. Americans are in unbearable pain. Americans feel dread. Not since Lincoln have we been this divided. As voices drown one another out, millions in the middle truly wonder how long before destruction be our lot.
We are drowning in falsehoods. We can’t trust anything we hear in the media. And no one knows how dangerous that is because it has never happened before.
Few Americans make it through a day without alcohol, a toke, a pill, powder, or a needle. For heaven’s sake, our children are taking their own lives over shoes, pictures, texts, and messages on social media. Yet, few admit the direct correlation between our misery and rejection of God.
What can save us? Nothing less than a massive moral awakening.
Maybe I’m biased because I’m a part of it, but I believe the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement holds the greatest promise of catalyzing a national miracle. Specifically, because of the truth of the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
Pentecostals have had the longest unbroken move of God in history. That is until now.
This movement is now weak, disoriented, divided, and rapidly losing relevance. It needs electrode paddles applied to her faintly beating heart. We were done in by our own version of a deep state. We were infiltrated. The engine that drove Spirit-filled momentum has been replaced.
A masterstroke of Satan—decades in its construction—worked to weaken many Spirit-filled leaders. Satan fooled leaders into replacing gold with bronze.
And he took away the treasures of the house of the Lord and the treasures of the king’s house; he took away everything. He also took away all the gold shields which Solomon had made. Then King Rehoboam made bronze shields in their place, and committed them to the hands of the captains of the guard, who guarded the doorway of the king’s house (1 Kings 14:26).
The devil used craftiness to steal our gold. We removed mass soul-winning through the Holy Spirit. He tossed the bone of getting a big church to drooling leaders. We replaced revival with marketing and well-oiled, business entertainment centers.
Grace is supposed to be a catalyst to holiness.
Grace is supposed to be a catalyst to holiness. A rampant new version of grace grants a license to lead a double life.
New Age nuances led many Spirit-filled Christians into out-of-Bible experiences. Never-never lands where emotional experiences and personal prophecies take supremacy over the Word of God.
The worst mistake was to stop teaching and leading people into the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
Most youth in Spirit-filled churches have never seen a miracle. The result is an entire generation doesn’t know what they believe, why they believe it let alone possess authority to share it. They embody Judges 2:10: “When all that generation had been gathered to their fathers, another generation arose after them who did not know the Lord nor the work which He had done for Israel.”
Fueling our demise are the preachers who are deepening the denial instead of warning the sheep entrusted to them by the Lord. They have even created a new level of denial saying things like, “We are blessed nothing bad is going to happen.” Or they avoid addressing the national disaster altogether.
Superstar speakers claim God has not called them to confront sin. No biblical lines are drawn against the perversions that are destroying the family.
They violated their first duty to educate believers in the Word of God and lead them into the power of God. They offered nothing that would arm believers to push back on the destruction of America.
Their presentation can make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but it leaves you and those you love unprotected from reality—and worse, it renders you unavailable to God.
Prophets warned the Church that marriage could be destroyed, and a boy could walk in on your little girl in the school bathroom. These smiling celebrities scoffed and said it would never happen.
Today these same voices are rejecting or ignoring the new and dire warnings of the Holy Spirit that we are on the brink of losing our nation altogether. The list of things they said can never happen but did happen grows each day. What will it take to wake us up?
God is warring to restore firepower to the movement that began in the lowly Azusa Street Mission. Rediscovering the power of the Holy Spirit holds the greatest potential to save our nation.
In this hour it is not enough to be saved and filled with the Holy Spirit—not nearly enough. Every soldier of God must know what God is doing in their time. The New Testament begins and ends with the drama of willing vessels having their lives interrupted, ruined for mortal pursuits, commissioned for great exploits, and then launched into an amazing adventure.
Knowing what God is doing in our time protects us. For years I wondered if the Word of God was contradicting itself. On the one hand, the Bible says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast” (Eph. 2:8–9). Clearly, we are not saved by works but by grace through faith.
But then Jesus said in Matthew 24:13, “But he who endures to the end shall be saved.” Doesn’t that mean that works save us? The answer is clear and wonderful. In Matthew 24, Jesus is foretelling the explosive events of the last days. He is teaching us how to live in those times. Our soul is saved from hell by grace and faith. Our lives are protected from last days’ disaster by enduring—by standing and pressing into the work of God in our time.
Those who go deeper and are active in God’s work receive special favor and intimacy with Christ. That protection is tied to fulfilling the very next verse: “And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come” (Matt. 24:14).
I am imprisoned in the reality that God is at war to save America. My passion has been to study His Word, seek His face, discern how He is waging this war, and determine my assignment in it.
I had an experience that seemed to take me from the depths of hell to the very throne of God. It jarred me and showed me the fierce war God is waging right now and how urgent it was for me to know my assignment.
At 3:00 a.m. the voice of God shook me awake. “Study the American youth culture.” My assignment was not a joy. Research uncovered a world of addiction, despair, and moral confusion that was beyond my strength to absorb.
Many days of this brought me to a horror. One night my room grew unusually dark. A stench introduced the evil presence. “I will,” the evil one said. “I will have them. I will addict them. I will pervert them. I will kill them.” Satan was talking about our children!
Just as suddenly, the presence of God flooded the room and swallowed the boasts of Satan, “But I will pour out of My Spirit on them and they shall prophesy.” I was awestruck by the presence and power of God. But what really impacted me was the ferocious zeal of the Lord to save America. He is not going let this nation go down without giving the devil the fight of his life.
God is doing something to save America. He is warring to save it. Do you know how He is doing this? We are at war. If you say the name of Christ, you are in this war. That you can’t see it or feel it doesn’t make it any less real—or any less dangerous. The question is do you know how God is fighting and do you know your assignment in this act of God?
Mario Murillo