IT’S TIME TO WAKE UP! By Dr. Michael L. Brown October 4, 2006
On Friday night, September 22, the eve of the Feast of Trumpets, I spoke at a meeting in Moravian Falls, North Carolina, urging those in attendance to hear the trumpet call, to wake up to reality, to recognize that we are in a life and death struggle, to understand that we cannot reduce a concept like “revolution” to a popular religious cliche. We really are in a war!
That Friday night service marked the beginning of a solemn, ten day season on the biblical calendar, beginning with the Feast of Trumpets (called Rosh HaShanah, the New Year, in Judaism) and ending at sunset, Monday, October 2, with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Jewish tradition calls these ten days the “days of awe,” a time of repentance and awakening and soul-searching, a time in which God is judging the world. It is a time to stir ourselves and to wake up. It is a sacred, holy season.
Little did any of us know that during the next ten days there would be three tragic school shootings – the most heinous and horrific of all being the slaughter of the five Amish girls on the Day of Atonement – not to mention news of the gay sex scandal involving Representative Mark Foley and some of his male pages.
All four cases involved minors, and three of the four cases involved the sexual molestation of children, including the claim by Congressman Foley that he himself had been abused by a clergyman when he was a teenager in addition to the report that the murderer of the Amish girls had molested minors in his family twenty years earlier when he was only twelve.
What has happened to our society? Has the world gone completely mad? The answer is absolutely yes, the world has gone completely mad – but this is hardly a recent development. As painful and shocking as these recent events are, the Scriptures state plainly: “We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one” (1 John 5:19). This is where we have allowed ourselves to be deceived, where we have failed to grasp reality. We live in a battle between two kingdoms, and we can never be totally at home in this world.
And yet there’s more. To whatever extent America was a “Christian nation” in the past, it has long since taken a terrible moral plunge. We went over the deep end years ago, and the slaughter of the Amish children did not mark the end of innocence in our nation. The end of innocence came decades ago – in fact, it came long before the Columbine massacre in 1999 and well before the legalizing of abortion in 1973 – but we have failed to grasp the urgency of the hour. Reality makes us uncomfortable, and we would rather continue to sleep on in comfort than wake up. But we cannot afford to slumber any longer. The trumpet is sounding a loud and clear note. It is time to wake up!
We need to face the facts: Our nation is saturated with violence – from TV to the movies to video games to the Internet to sports – and is drowning in sexual addictions. And no one has been more attacked than the children, from abortion on demand to the decimation of the family, and from sexual predators (we have roughly 400,000 registered sex offenders in our land) to godless educational curricula. The cold-blooded, execution-style killing of little children in a one-room school house only underscores the moral depravity of our society. It is but a symptom of our long-standing sickness.
In 1969 Dr. Bill Bright wrote, “We live in the most revolutionary period of human history. . . . Social band-aids and reform antiseptics give little hope for a cure or even an improvement. A revolution is needed.” How much more can this be said today? It is revolution or we die, revolution or it’s over, revolution or it’s too late. And the only way we can have a true Jesus Revolution in our nation – a non-violent revolution based on purity, compassion, and sacrifice rather than one based on anger, intimidation, rebellion, and force – is to have a sweeping revival in our churches. We need a massive, repentance-based, Spirit-empowered movement that awakens us from our stupor and calls us to battle. We have no other choice!
It is true that, as Americans, we have the responsibility to be involved in the political process, doing what we can to elect righteous officials and to call our elected officials to stand for what is right. Yet we must be realistic: There is no political solution for our nation’s illness, nor will a new Christian teaching or an exciting new seminar get the job done. We need a spiritual, moral, and cultural revolution.
In 1999, the call for a Jesus revolution began to be sounded by many leaders throughout America and around the world. Seven years later, that call is louder and clearer than ever. Can we count you in?
