Low Water Mark

 Read carefully the conditions of society. To be more specific the conditions on college campuses. Lawlessness abounds. Common drunkenness. Profanity piercing common conversations. Immorality increases. Unrestrained gratification rules. Most students are skeptics. Fewer believers on each campus. Colleges are the seed beds of infidelity. Anti church and anti-God rhetoric abound. Typical students are atheists. God is mocked. Bibles are burned. Worship services are interrupted with protests of profanity. Buildings are burned. Many  college presidents are forced to resign. It is a low water mark in Christianity. 

These descriptions are like reading the front pages of newspapers. It might surprise you to learn that everything I wrote in the previous paragraph came from historians writing about college campuses between 1780-1800. In fact, here is a quote. "The last two decades of the eighteenth century were the darkest period, spiritually and morally, in the history of American Christianity, the low water mark of its lowest ebb-tide." That was written by W.W. Sweet in his book The Story of Religion in America. 

Things are bad now. Very bad. They have been very bad in the past. So bad that Christians began crying out to God for His miraculous intervention. God did work that miracle. He sent more than a revival. He sent an awakening. What is the difference? Revival is God bringing His saved people to repentance and back to spiritual vitality again. An awakening is when large masses of people are saved on a short period of time in such fashion that it transforms a culture. 

America needs an awakening. The world needs an awakening. A God sent movement that sweeps over the land like wildfires that spread uncontrollably over dry pastures and forests. Such movements start when two conditions are met. God's people get serious about repentance of sin and become assiduously devoted to prayer. 

We have allowed things to spiral out of control. No elected politician will turn this low water mark around. It will take someone of much higher power. Only God can save America from our current condition. Nationalism has become its own religion. Many well meaning Christians have misguided their focus and energies in the political process. I am not saying believers should not be engaged in trying to get the right people elected into office. These days it is harder to say who those right people are. Many promise one thing on the campaign trails and then pad their pockets with lobbyists money once elected forgetting about the people who elected them. Even the right politicians with noble motives are limited in what they can do through legislation. They cannot legislate the hearts of people. 

That is the issue. The hearts of people are wicked. See Jeremiah 17:9. If America will survive, there must be a change of hearts. That cannot be done by Congress, the President, or the Supreme Court. Only God can change the hearts of people. At some point, I hope the church awakens to this reality and takes her rightful place back on the walls keeping prayerful watch over our nation. We failed miserably on the job and Satan never tires of deceiving people to turn their back on God and to follow demonic paths toward destruction. I know I sound like a broken record in recent days. I can do no other. I see the perilous path we are own and have renewed myself resolved to do all in my power to pray, preach, and write to alter our course. Some will get tired of reading these things or listening to the sermons. I cannot sit by idly and watch this nation destroy itself without doing my part to turn us back toward God. 

America has been at a low water mark like we are today in the past. God spared us then. I plead that He might spare us again. Once more that He might mercifully send another awakening across the land and around the world. That is our only hope.