Renewing Spiritual Fervor in Dark Times

Now all of us are aware that we are living in days that are becoming evidently darker. We grieve the violence of our own city, we grieve the violence in our country. We see that many people have lost a sense of living under the fear of the Lord, and we can list multiple ways in which evil is clearly on the rise. [00:25:23]

Surely the point is that as the days get darker, the great temptation that we face is to become half-hearted Christians, that we sort of follow Jesus Christ at a distance, that we say things are getting tougher out there, that we somehow keep our heads down, that we say well let's just keep our faith private. [00:18:44]

Everybody knows how hard it is to run when the wind is in your face, to make progress in swimming if you're going against the tide. So when evil is on the rise, the natural effect of that is to become more quickly jaded. We begin to wonder more often what's the point. [00:49:09]

What I want us to see today is that when God speaks to us as he does in the scripture that's before us today about going off the boil, about running cool, about losing our energy, our passion, our commitment for living for him and serving him, he is speaking to something surely that every Christian in some way and at some time experiences. [08:28:44]

If there is one consideration more humbling than another, we would say more humbling than any other to a spiritually minded believer, it is that after all God has done for him there should still exist in the heart a principle the tendency of which is to secret, perpetual, and alarming departure from God. [13:12:31]

When you feel jaded, flat, lethargic, lacking in enthusiasm, when you feel yourself growing cold, you have to take responsibility for your own spiritual condition. You're in Christ, the Holy Spirit of God lives within you, you're not helpless, you can act, you must take yourself in hand, you must rouse yourself. [16:04:19]

There are certain truths that when you rightly apply them to your own condition will lift you and will renew you and will re-energize you and will motivate you. Here is how to rouse your soul when you are in a funk, how to restore your spiritual fervor, how to get yourself back on the boil. [16:58:59]

Christ redeems, Christ restores, and Christ reigns. These wonderful truths rightly applied to your own life when you're jaded and lethargic will be by God's grace his means of restoring your soul and renewing your spiritual fervor. Let's look at the three together: number 1, Christ redeems. [17:36:05]

When you're rundown, when your soul is sluggish, the place to begin is in renewing your fervor is really to take in a good dose of all that it is that God has done for you in Jesus Christ. Now I want this to be really practical today because I know that I'm speaking to a real experience. [19:20:39]

The Lord restores my soul. So God commands us not to be slothful in zeal but to be fervent in spirit, but we don't have what it takes in and offer ourselves to obey these commands. Remember how Augustine and that very famous statement said of God's commands when he looked at them. [27:30:49]

When you run down, when you're jaded, when you're in a funk, you have to come to Christ as you are. You can't come any other way, can you? And Octavius Winslow who I mentioned earlier in that book that I pointed to, he makes this point always remember that Satan wants to keep you in a funk. [31:00:21]

Jesus Christ does not say now look get yourselves back on the boil and then come to me and I will give you rest. He says come to me all you who are weary, see just as you are, you come to me when you're in a funk, you come to me and you're jaded in your discouragement. [33:44:69]