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Zephaniah is saying to the Children of Israel, "Things will not always be as they are. God promises something better. There will be a new day." Advent says it over again once a year. When are we going to respond in faith and let God change the destructive trends of history?

The Children of Israel had had a bad time. Bad leaders had confused them. Only a new vision of God could again bring focus to their lives. They had been caught between the rivalry of the great powers of Assyria, Babylon, and Egypt; and the Scythians had complicated the picture. They had lost hope. Zephaniah was seeking to restore that hope. He knew that, now as then, that hope was in God - his righteousness, his power!

Zephaniah points to this divine liberation:

The Lord hath taken away thy judgments,
He hath cast out thine enemy:
The king of Israel, even the Lord,
Is in the midst of thee:
Thou shalt not see evil any more.
(Zephaniah 3:15)

Zephaniah continued with his vision of hope: "Sing, O daughter of Zion; shout, O Israel; be glad and rejoice with all the heart ..." (Zephaniah 3:14)

Trust the vision. Respond with singing and shouting. Get excited about what God can do. Zephaniah continues to hit the nail on the head: "In that day it shall be said to Jerusalem, 'Fear thou not.' " (Zephaniah 3:16) Again: "The Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save ..." (3:17) "At that time I will bring you again, even in the time that I gather you ... when I turn back your captivity before your eyes, saith the Lord." (3:20)

Zephaniah also says a strange thing: "I will also leave in the midst of thee an afflicted and poor people, and they shall trust in the name of the Lord. The remnant of Israel shall not do iniquity, nor speak lies; neither shall a deceitful tongue be found in their mouth: for they shall feed and lie down, and none shall make them afraid." (Zephaniah 3:12-13)

Does this mean that God cannot help us when we are "riding high," too sure of ourselves and our own powers? Does this mean that we are too well-off to be better off? Does this Scripture suggest that when we have gone through captivity and deep trouble, only then are we ready for new life? Does poverty and humility open the doors to personal and national sanity? Are we ready to admit that we need help? Are we ready to receive the kind of help that comes from a new relationship with God? It worked with the Children of Israel; but will we open the doors of our hearts and our nation to Divine Grace? Terrorism and wars and drugs and broken homes will not be healed any other way. God still holds out his two hands: we receive either the judgment or the healing.

Over against this, we look at our own predicament. " 'Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit,' saith the Lord." But look at us, as described in a recent sermon to the North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church by Bishop C. Dale White. He quotes Admiral LaRoche, saying that "profits are driving the arms race." Weapons corporations, such as G.E. and Rockwell and Westinghouse and GTE, to mention only a few, first promote the nuclear weapons build-up, then produce the weapons of global destruction at public expense for private profit - over $133 billion in defense contracts in 1984 alone. The nation's largest defense contractors have doubled their political donations since 1980, with the top twenty defense contractors having poured three and one-half million dollars into the 1984 congressional and presidential campaigns. And the threat of the ultimate nuclear war becomes darker and darker on the horizon, and terror and violence continues.

Perhaps we ought to be trying harder to understand our enemies and seek ways and means of establishing a just peace. The opportunity for sane spiritual leadership in a world like this is wide open. Bishop White mentions a Christian youth group who traveled to the Soviet Union and got acquainted with the young Communist Leaguers, brilliant university students, who were brought out to debate our kids. What the Soviet authorities did not know was that so many of these young people were secret Christians. (There are 90 million Christians today in the Soviet Union.)

How did these kids get to be Christian? When I was in the Soviet Union in 1962, I noticed that few young adults were at church. But the churches were full of grandmothers and grand children. Grandmama knew that she had lost her children to the faith. She knew she could not live much longer. She was determined that the faith should not die with her. She taught her grandchildren well the realities of the Christian faith. In his sermon, Bishop White says, "Over the long term the Soviet system is not going to be able to stand against the babushkas (the grandmothers)."

A brilliant young Chinese teacher from a Communist family spent six months as an exchange teacher with our daughter in North Carolina. This future leader in China became a radiant Christian while here and carries her faith back to her people. The people of Russia and the people of China are hungry and starved for faith. It can break out there with unbelievable force. Even Castro has recently written a book on religion, which is a best-seller in Cuba. Trust God. He is at work in the world. He just might surprise us with his saving power, just as he did the Children of Israel. But we have a problem in America: we have drifted from our faith and spiritually we are in a far-country. Can there be an awakening here sufficient to touch every facet of our lives with a Christ-like spirit, impregnated with the almighty power of the God of love and forgiveness?

Dr. Albert Outler, a contemporary theologian, has stated, "The mainline Protestant movement cannot survive the twentieth century without the coming of the Third Great Evangelical Awakening." Dr. Outler continues, "There are now signs that the Third Great Awakening might be beginning to break in upon us." But God's promises of righteousness and peace cannot be fulfilled unless we respond to God's new offering of himself.

Let us look backward for a moment. Our first great spiritual awakening came upon us in the colonial period. Jonathan Edwards was perhaps its chief spokesman. It set New England on fire for God. It deeply influenced and shaped our early national life. We became a people founded on faith and guided by high moral principles. This great dynamic movement was interrupted by the Revolutionary War.

Then a secular erosion began to bite into the moral and spiritual commitments of our young nation. America was deeply affected by the "Enlightenment," championed by Voltaire and other French philosophers. The Christian principles of our nation lost some of their prominence and influence.

Our second Great Awakening was a kind of up-welling of the Spirit throughout the whole nation and particularly on the frontier. Strong, rugged men and women were converted to a vital experience of the Living Christ. A beneficial emotional tide was released throughout the nation. A new commitment to essential morality in life and relationships was experienced. The developing institutions of our growing nation were powerfully affected and shaped by this spiritual breakthrough. But this movement of the spirit was interrupted by the Civil War and the national confusion following thereafter.

Since then we have experienced the growth of "liberalism" and the development of an essential social awareness. Still later neoorthodoxy broke in upon us, and at length the "God is dead" movement marked the end of an era. We began to worship science instead of God, even as many great scientists were rediscovering God. Einstein remarked to a friend of mine, as the two of them met on the Princeton campus, "It came to me! It came to me!" Some great new insight into the sub-nuclear world had come to him. He realized that he was only gaining insights into the ultimate truth of God's creation.

Dr. Outler believes that neither of the past Awakenings can be resurrected. The Third Great Spiritual Awakening for America will have to be on its own, fresh from God, expressed in the terms of the age in which we now live. He says, "There is no hope without a new evangelical awakening."

There is movement in the air. There is a stirring in the hearts of men. They say that we are coming to the end of the "Secular Age" - because Secularism just did not answer the deepest hungers of the human heart. It left a void, a vacuum, and all kinds of broken relationships developed therefrom. It is said that many contemporary philosophers are shifting from atheism to an acceptance of God. Robert Jastrow, a well-known astronomer said recently in one of his books (author's paraphrase): "In searching for truth, scientists have struggled across the plains, have climbed the hills, have conquered the mountain ranges, have scaled the highest peaks, only to discover that persons of faith have been there all the time." As he did, in the time of the prophets, God is once more extending his hand of promise, offering fulfilment of life. A flash from the mind of God bursts into the mind of some receptive person. It spreads from mind to mind, from heart to heart, from person to person; love is born, the sun rises, the climate of the world is changed.

I have seen the signs of this breakthrough. Outstanding youth all over the world are moving forward in a fresh experience of Christ. Young ministers are once more seeking and discovering the power of faith. There are small-group movements all over the country in which the Holy Spirit is being experienced with power for healing, for comfort, for guidance and for ministry. There is a fresh movement in the Roman Catholic Church, where the Spirit of God is breaking out with new power and fresh direction and moving dynamically in the hearts of laypersons and priests alike.

The Third Great Awakening for America may not start in America. I, myself, have seen the spirit coming alive in Australia, South Africa, South America, and even in Russia. Africa and Korea are now experiencing powerful spiritual movements. Old line protestant churches are becoming alarmed by their loss of vitality, and are beginning to open the doors to spiritual vitality. There is hope, and evidence of fulfilment.

We will probably be surprised at the nature of its coming. The new "moral majority," even though we may disagree with much that it does and does not stand for, can be the splinter of a great movement. This coming spiritual awakening will not be for any one nation, but for the whole world - for all of life, all the institutions of our contemporary living, all the media of communication, the political world, the world of international relations, the world of industry and finance. As someone has said, "God is interested in more than religion." The new spiritual dynamic will reshape persons inwardly, and all their relationships outwardly.

We are reminded that the Dark Ages lasted almost six-hundred years. We cannot survive if we have to wait six-hundred years for the next breakthrough. At the moment we are experiencing the end of an age. We can see the old values disintegrating; we can observe the old cultures disappearing; this is the moment to act. "This is the day and the hour to proclaim Christ as Lord of all of life and human relationships, before the door closes upon us for another thousand years."

The Third Great Evangelical Awakening will be the same as, yet different from, the first two. Our theme could be: "The Word of Life - God's Good News for Man's Bad News."

I

This spiritual breakthrough will be marked by an effective Gospel to persons: individual persons will know they are forgiven - freed from guilt. Their lives will be reordered. They will discover new peace and meaning. They will be launched joyfully into a new life of commitment and purpose; they will know where they are going; they will have a new sense of destiny. Many individuals will find healing and a new wholeness. The fresh Christian experience will be marked by lives that radiate the Spirit of Jesus, and the glory of God. Gracious living will be noted in family relationships, in neighborhoods, in cities, and in business relations. Instead of blighting adversarial relations, there will be a spirit of mutual caring and support. The new gracious living will be recognized as the Spirit of Jesus. We will no longer be as tired, as bored, as hopeless as we seem to be at present. The Third Millenium is upon us! Will it be death or life?

We illustrate this personal experience of Christ with a story. A boy was asked by his pastor, as a lesson in prayer, to write a letter to God each day for a week, and to bring those letters to the pastor. In reporting, the boy told his pastor, "At first I felt silly. Then one day it seemed like God was looking over my shoulder as I wrote; that night I couldn't sleep. I knew I was not getting along well with my parents; I knew I was not getting along well at school. It was just like turning your life over into some one else's hands. The next morning at breakfast I felt that my parents loved me. At school there was a completely new relationship with other students. I'm a new person."

II

The Third Great A wakening will be realized in The Gospel of Community. Charles DeGaulle once made a statement: "Man has reached the moon - that isn't enough. The real distances are in human relationships." The real distances are between husband and wife, parents and children, blacks and whites, rich and poor, our world and the third world, employer and employee, between the nations of the world. Only the Spirit of God can bridge such vast distances. In Christ, there will be a new community. Believing persons will know each other, love each other, accept each other, undergird each other. Homes will know the warmth of love; race relations will be healed; a new wholeness will come to humanity.

Pentecost set up a community. Christianity became a life-style of love and grace. Even now in koinonia fellowship groups the presence of God is known. The courage to live comes through with strength. There's mutual undergirding in the bearing of burdens and in the solving of problems.

III

The Third Great A wakening will reveal a Gospel of creative social Relationships. The energy of the Holy Spirit will not only recreate the person, and give life to fellowship and community, but it will break out of all bounds to permeate the streams of life and all corporate relationships. We will experience "A new heart in a new environment." John Wesley was converted as an individual at "a quarter of nine" in Aldersgate Street. He began his effective ministry to England in Bristol when he was forced to preach in the open air, and was put in touch with the desperate people of his time. England discovered "not regeneration through revolution, but revolution through regeneration." That our world must come to accept.

If we are really going to attack the social problems of our time, we will need Christ at our side and the power of the Holy Spirit in our crusade. We will discover in any city of our time, as Zephaniah discovered in his time, you cannot hide the broken bodies of a broken society - they are all about us. Every Advent is a dawn of hope.

Lord Donald Soper, a great protestant leader in England who is known for his ministry to humanity in London, was famous for his witness to the Christian faith on a soapbox in Hyde Park for forty years, and has been elevated to the House of Lords where he fights for Christian social legislation, spoke to a conference I was attending. Someone asked him, "If you were invited to speak in the White House and had one chance to speak to the President of the United States, what would you preach on?" This dedicated man responded: "I would preach about the love of God, and I would have to speak so specifically that I probably would not be asked to stay for lunch."

Bishop Earl G. Hunt, Jr. reminds us, "This new gospel has to do with ecology, and with poverty, and with war." It is true that a society geared to violence can be transformed into a society geared to love, implemented by persons of love.

Saint John was right when he read the headlines of his day and saw, over against the suffering, the persecution, the death of the early Christians, the light of eventual victory. He wrote, "He who sits upon the throne says, 'Behold, I make all things new.' "

God is beginning to "do His thing"! This is our hope! The Third Great Evangelical Awakening is on the way! A great surge of the Kingdom of Christ is upon us. Let the prophets proclaim! Let the people arise and follow!