The End-Times Deception That’s Blocking the Greatest Revival Ever

Something is going to happen, in spite of the impossible odds, in spite of the hardness of our generation.

Deep down inside me where the real knowing goes on, I know something is going to happen! A great revival! Let’s face it! The thought of a nationwide penetration of righteousness, of a true revival, seems so unreal. We can’t even remember the last time the roar of God was heard in the land. We can’t remember the times in American history when mayors or major cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Denver, and Portland proclaimed revival and closed city offices and businesses to go to churches and pray.

Maybe you are like me. You walk around with an unearthly frustration. You know something is about to happen! You hear the cry of some wonderful, invisible event that wants to be born. This book is about the yearning many have to see a fresh act of God. I count as my dearest friends those precious few who have not given up on our generation. I love those who are not defeated by the present evil. They can still hear the resurrection voice of Jesus. They know that the Holy Spirit has not abandoned us. They know that a strategy is available. They believe there is a plan to take back what Satan has stolen.

I got to a point where I was sure my mind was failing. Convulsions of truth gripped me. God removed contentment. I was feeling deep birth pangs. With paralyzing clarity I saw the puny effect of the church and my own efforts and realized that this generation is essentially unchanged by everything that we have said and done.

God’s words through Haggai hit me between the eyes:

Now therefore, thus says the Lord of hosts: “Consider your ways! You have sown much, and bring in little; you eat, but do not have enough; you drink, but you are not filled with drink; you clothe yourselves, but no one is warm; and he who earns wages, earns wages to put into a bag with holes” (Haggai 1:5-6).

Questions about revival consumed me because I know that there is no substitute for revival, and now there is no alternative but revival. What are revivals? How do they happen? Has God given us a plan for revival? God reduced me to a child. I waited for answers. I prayed fervently, I studied feverishly and listened intently to elderly saints who were eyewitnesses to awakenings. Time passed quickly, and there never seemed enough hours in a day to continue my quest. This book is the result of my agonizing journey. I was shocked to find so little had been written about revival. These kinds of books must be hated by Satan. When you walk into a religious book store, you have to dig past all the books on Christian diets, dating, and mood control to find those abandoned texts that tell us how to release the glory of God on a dying world.

Even when I did find books on revival, they were thin as far as providing answers to my real questions. Mostly, they tell us the events that happened and then offer opinions about what caused them. I wondered, Why doesn’t somebody simply tell us what to do?! Where is the practical revival training? What are the steps we take to get to this amazing act of God? Soon, it became too painful to read about the wonderful revivals that have happened in America. I wanted to scream, “That’s great…but we need another one! Now what do we do?!” How I thank God for the nuggets of truth that faithful saints have left us. Thank God for the historians who didn’t embalm past revivals in honey, but reported them accurately and gave us a map for a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

So it was, after all my searching and all my crying, that God caused my slow heart to hear His voice. Every page you are about to read contains the priceless answers to my deepest questions about the miracle we call revival. But before there can be a great awakening, there must come a rude awakening. You must face those misconceptions and attitudes that will prevent you from receiving the revelation I call “Reaching Critical Mass.”

Keep in mind that this is a book for hungry pastors, leaders, and believers. Where there is false doctrine, secret sin, or malice toward the moving of the Holy Spirit, the subject of revival should not even be approached.

Here is a list of conditions that may exist in even the most ardent believer that will stop truth from penetrating:

1. Wanting “teaching” but not training. At first this sounds like nit-picking, but look more closely. Do we love to hear deep truth without implementing it? Many have become CD and DVD tapeworms who wallow in what they know.

Ezekiel was told by God, “they hear your words, but they do not do them; for with their mouth they show much love, but their hearts pursue their own gain” (Ezekiel 33:31). Training is what we need. Training is different from teaching because to train someone is to require them to perform. What we need is revival training. The content of this book is not something for you to know, it is something for you to do.

2. Feeling inferior to previous generations of Christians. Again, when revival “experts” portray a past group of saints as being a better grade of believer, they violate history and they play into a tactic of Satan.

Often I’ve heard preachers say that the first-century Christians shook their world without newspapers, jets, or the internet. Does technology give us an advantage or make people more receptive to the gospel? Absolutely not! Only a clear work of the Spirit can open men’s hearts. This is as true today as it was in the first century.

Paul the apostle would be amazed by our feelings of inferiority. He would zealously encourage us and recount in how many ways those book of Acts saints were human. If God did it for them, He can do it for us! We can seize God’s grace to overcome faults, just as they did.

3. Seeing revival as an unachievable state of bliss and perfection. No past revival was perfect. When they are pictured so idealistically, one will make the mistake of thinking revivals are nearly impossible to get. Grace and mercy permeate every past awakening. Revivals are a dramatic mingling of God’s mercy and the occasional bungling of His servants.

4. Abusing end-time prophecy. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in the second coming of Christ. What I reject is the attitude that uses end-time prophecy to give defeatism a cloak of decency. The corruption of the last days is a very easy excuse for a fearful church to hide behind. But we must not violate scripture to justify our failures. Certainly things are going to “wax worse and worse,” but Jesus forever sealed the issue in Matthew 24:14 when He said the world cannot end until there is a worldwide impact of His gospel.

That remains our task: to shake the earth with Good News. If we use scriptures out of context to tell us it can’t be done, God will find someone else to do the job. If we are too bent on escaping the idea of attacking, Satan will bewilder us. What a strange army—a sword in one hand and a suitcase in the other! Before we ask for revival, we must be sure that we believe it can happen.

5. Spiritual smugness. Whether it is professionalism in a pastor or apathy in a saint, the result is the same. If we turn a deaf ear to God, He will look to someone else to finish His work. To be smug is to be falsely content with results that are skimpy. It is not an outright rejection of God’s work; it is more a mixture of a sense of exaggerated self-importance and a numbing lack of urgency.

In the church today we have made it fashionable to want revival. It is “in” to talk revival talk. Satan has no wish to bury revival talk, but rather, he wants to congratulate us for only saying we want it. He is amused by our pompous symbolic efforts to bring revival. The devil delights in the fact of our pride. We are so pleased with our awareness of the need for revival that it seems enough to just want it.

There is a young crop of Christians who are entirely different from swooning saints. These young Christians ask disturbing questions about why we always seem to want something that we never deliberately try to get. If the church is not careful, we may be passed over in favor of this new breed of believers who don’t have our religious childhood diseases.

Finally, let me ask you to read each stage of revival, understanding that they are all connected in a divine progression. Don’t skip ahead but let the truth open like a flower. Then, begin to adapt and change according to each step of faith.

In 2 Chronicles 7:14 there is a promise. We’ve all heard it, believed it, but probably never realized its significance. Embedded in that verse are the step-by-step instructions to follow in order to remove Satan’s vile talons from the throat of our nation.

Critical mass is a nuclear term. It refers to the minimum amount of radioactive material that can and will sustain a nuclear chain reaction of glory on our nation. If you are one of those who are hungry to be part of that, read on.