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Repent and Do The Things You Did At First
Part 3 of a 3 part series
by Major Howard Webber

  

William Booth said, “I do not want another ecclesiastical corps cumbering the earth. When The Salvation Army ceases to be a militant body of red hot men and women whose business is the saving of souls, I hope it will vanish utterly.” What a word!

 

A message for the Army today

The Founder’s words reflect Christ’s message to the Church at Ephesus in Revelation. It is a timeless message – a message for today’s Salvation Army:

 

“I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked men…You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary.

Yet this I hold against you: You have forsaken your first love. Remember the height from which you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place.” (Revelation 2:2-5)

 

What has been lost

Has our movement’s erosion over the past decades been God gradually removing our lampstand from where he once placed it? Certainly we work hard and are doing much that Christ would commend, but we are not doing what once we did. We may well have acknowledged the height from which we have fallen, yet tragically, so much of our response to that knowledge has been about saving ourselves from extinction, restoring our numbers, climbing back.

 

Over twenty years of church growth principles, conferences and councils, seminars and studies has done little to stop our terminal decline. None of these things will save us. None of these things will end the drought, the all-consuming locust or the plague that threatens to destroy us. God alone can save us, but we have yet to reach the point of utter helplessness and humility where we acknowledge that God and God alone can save us.

 

“When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people, if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and forgive their sin and will heal their land.” 2 Chron 7: 13-15

 

We have yet to be troubled enough, anxious enough, burdened enough to pray as we ought. Our prayers have yet to reach an intensity, a passion, a fervency, where:

  1. we ache for God and what he desires;

  2. we see the lost as he sees them;

  3. we ache for the lost with the longing he has; and

  4. we get rid of everything that gets in the way of our hunger after him and our longing after them.

 

Send the fire

Fire came down supernaturally upon Moses’ offering Lev 9:24, David’s offering 1 Chron 21:26, Solomon’s offering 2 Chron 7:1, Elijah’s offering, 1 Kings 18:38. It was fire coming down supernaturally from heaven in the self-same way that ‘lit up’ those early day apostles (Acts 2: 3-4), and has revived God’s people and refocused their attention and energies on the eternal issues, and drawn countless masses to Christ and his cross through the ages since.

 

‘Tis fire we want, ‘tis fire we need, send the fire.’ SASB 203; we readily sing it, but is it true? How much do we want God’s Holy Spirit power? We have yet to reach the desperation and despair of men like John Knox who wept before the Lord, “Give me Scotland or I die.”

 

What we need from God is his burden for the lost. Listen to St Paul, “I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, those of my own race.” (Romans 9: 2-3). It isn’t about being an evangelist, but rather, having a burden that causes us to plead and pray relentlessly to God to do something until he does, with the attitude, “If sinners be damned, at least let them leap to hell over our bodies. If they perish, let them perish with our arms about their knees. Let no one go there unwarned and unprayed for.” Charles H Spurgeon.

 

Where, today, are there people anxious for the lost, weeping for the lost, pleading for the lost?  Who truly cares?

  

  

 

 

 

   

 

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