Confession Community and Revival   Aflame Church Perth 5/6/23

https://youtu.be/4OBL18vsdHo

Introduction

I have been asked by my old friends (Pastors) Jimmy and Evelin to give an “exaltation message on prayer for revival”. Such a message could lead in two possible directions. Firstly, we could focus on how the scriptures exhort us to lift up the name of the Lord, a very worthwhile call to obey[1]. Or we could focus on God’s exaltation of Jesus and how the Spirit applies that lifting up to us[2]. The first direction would lead us into copying the strategy of the masters of human exaltation, the megachurches[3], but understanding that revival is a sovereign mysterious work of God, in which he shares power of the resurrection of his Son (cf. Phil 3:10), leads us into a totally opposite direction. It is no accident that no sinful person was permitted to observe the resurrection event. Thankfully, in the economy of grace, the invisibility[4] of the resurrection is matched by the public nature of the passions/sufferings of Jesus. We not only have the Gospel accounts, but Paul boldly testifies, “It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified.” (Ga 3:1). There are therefore biblical, theological, and practical reasons[5] of the profoundest sort urging me[6] to tech on the exaltation of Jesus by the Father as fully and directly as possible (Phil 1:20). This will involve us engaging with the strange ways of the Lord in beautifying his beloved Bride “by the washing of water through the word” (Eph 5:26). Before I do that, let me share a little of my personal history.

I have been involved in numerous prayer and unity movements in Perth for decades, Pastors Prayer Summits, Pray WA, PrayerNet WA, IDOP for the Persecuted Church, Global Day of Prayer, Geo networks and so on. The greatest transformation of my prayer life happened in the late 80’s when I was called to attend a convention in Adelaide featuring the pastor of the then largest church in the world, Yonggi Cho. Before Cho stood up and announced his topic, I knew exactly what he was about to say… “Today I want to speak on prayer and revival”[7]. Cho went on to give many examples of spectacular miracles and concluded by telling us that if we want to see revival, pastors need to pray 3 hours a day and others 1 hour a day. I sensed the Lord calling me to a daily minimum of an hour in prayer. A commitment I have basically kept.

Given that the greatest enemy of prayer is self-consciousness[8], the greatest antidote to prayerlessness the Lord has provided in his all-wise plan of salvation (Rom 16:27) is the Spirit’s gift of Christ-consciousness (1 Cor 2:16). This involves being empowered to first see ourselves as we are outside of Jesus (cf. John 15:5) leading into a progressive revelation of our new identity in our union with Christ[9]. This understanding explains why the first sign of every genuine and lasting revival is confession[10]. Human beings all long for happiness, but very few appreciate that as sinning beings our happiness depends on a life routine of confession and forgiveness[11].

Original Sin

The root sin, the “original sin”, that hinders revival prayer (because the first fruit of a move of God is extraordinary prayer[12]) is putting oneself above God, [especially as he has been revealed in Christ]. Adam’s error is that he believed the devil’s publicity about himself[13], “God knows that when you eat of it (the tree of knowledge) your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”” (Gen 3:5). This was a promise of a form of sovereignty over self that went beyond the God-given commission to have dominion over all living things (Gen 1:28). The prospect of self-rule (autonomy) was irresistible, and it still is. Go into any newsagency at the time of a Lotto draw is and you will find it full of folk who believe that the promise of an unrestrained” Lotto life” is worth gambling on. Lest we be arrogant, more sensible people share the same goal of independence from external constraints but are committed to an (middle-class) ethic of working hard to attain prosperity. In sinning, Eve and Adam forgot (cf. 2 Pet 1:9) they were created in the image of God made with a law written on their hearts to move them to seek the obedience to his will and commandments which alone brings true freedom. Sin is a contradiction of nature at the very deepest level[14]. St. Augustine famously said that “to serve God is perfect freedom”[15].

The deep power of the drive to “do one’s own thing for one’s own glory” comes to a head in certain Old Testament prophetic texts. In Isaiah 14:13-14 God speaks of Satanic figure[16], “You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God I will set my throne on high; I will sit on the mount of assembly in the far reaches of the north; 14 I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.’” And of the usurper in Ezekiel 28 “you have said, ‘I am a god, I sit in the seat of the gods” (28:1 ff.). The beast-like ruler in Daniel will “exalt himself and magnify himself above every god” (Dan 11:36). In the New Testament the final “man of lawlessness… opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God”  (2 Thess 2:4). Since we once were those “following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience” (Eph 2:2), they speak to the disposition of our hearts.

The only Person with power to free us from our depraved[17] fallen desires,[18] is  Jesus who became perfectly free through his sacrificial obedience[19] to the Law written on the human heart by creation in the divine image (Rom 2:15; Jer 31:33).

God exalts Jesus as a Human Being

There are two climactic events of supreme saving significance to the life of Jesus, the first is his Incarnation, his becoming a human being (John 1:14). Here he “emptied himself” of his eternal glory (Phil 2:7). This was a progressive journey throughout the life of the Lord.

Christ’s awareness of his humble position in relation to the Father intensifies as he approaches the cross. Before he stoops to wash his disciples feet  (John 13) we read, “Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God” (v.3), then in the great High Priestly prayer of John 17, Jesus “lifted up his eyes to heaven”, and said “Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed (vv1 ff.). Then in Gethsemane the Spirit moves him[20] to testify, “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.” (Mark 14:36).

If confession of sin is an open taking of responsibility for the consequences of evil, we can discern that Christ’s great struggle in the Garden, a struggle so intense that as he prays he is sweating blood (Luke 22:44), is a struggle to bear responsibility for the consequences of the sin of the whole world (John 1:29)[21].

In God’s order, exaltation must follow humiliation, “therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name” (Phil 2:9)[22] This is the second great saving act of God in Christ.

By submitting to utter humiliation[23] followed by sure divine exaltation[24] Jesus permanently reverses the course of human history. Paul expounds this great exchange, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God… For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.” (2 Cor 5:21; 8:9). Jesus prophesied about his own death, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” 33 He said this to show by what kind of death he was going to die.” (John 12:32-33). Only by “descending to the lower parts of the earth”. As Paul puts it in Ephesians 4, does Jesus come to “fill all things” (Eph 4:9-10) through his Spirit via his Body the Church, “his body, the fullness of him who fills all things in every way.” (Eph 1:23). These are end-time realities which must fill our vision of the Lord.

At the start of 1994 a small group gathered for 7 days of prayer in Perth, 6 am- 6 pm daily. It was a rich prophetic time, but the final day was especially difficult with divisions and accusations in all directions. The spiritual resistance was so intense that it became so hard to intercede that I found myself face down on to the carpet in order to keep praying. The Lord then placed a scripture from Acts in my heart[25] about “the restoration of all things” by the heavenly Christ, then I had a manifestation of Jesus in his exalted heavenly position and under him were all the spheres of life and culture: politics, education, the arts, business…… He was restoring perfect order to them all through the wisdom he gives to the Church (Eph 3:10). The Lord’s isn’t about ever larger congregations it is about the extension of his sovereign rule over all of reality[26].

Only to the degree that we submit to the Lord’s taking us down and down can we experience more and more of the exaltation of Christ. Though Jesus is one with the everlasting Father (John 17:5), in order to lift our humanity up to its God-ordained status with him in the heavenlies[27], he had to take on our nature in its weakest, most base and lowliest form. His glory as God made man needed to become unrecognisable to our carnal/fleshly/sensual eyes[28]. Only a Spirit-inspired prophet could testify, “he had no form/visible appearance or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him” (Isa 53:2)[29]. The great U -term in Christ’s life history for us finds potently expressed in Paul’s declaration “Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (Phil 2:9-11)[30]. That this is a U turn in the saving history of all humanity, is from Pentecost on being revealed before angels and humans in what we call “revival”. Every revival witnesses to this unceasing pattern of humiliation for the sake of exaltation. Every revival puts on display the mystery of how God’s sovereign wisdom is released in humanity by the gospel. Every revival is a revelation that a human being has been graced with a full share in the universal sovereignty of God over all things. Even the highest celestial creatures closest to the throne of God must conform to this dynamic pattern of lowliness for exaltation, “the twenty-four elders fall down before him who is seated on the throne and worship[31] him who lives forever and ever. They cast their crowns before the throne, saying, 11 “Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honour and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.”” (Rev 4:10-11)[32]. All this has profound implications for the prayer life of the Church as we know it. I heard the young man (Zach Meerkreebs) whose teaching provoked the recent Asbury revival online the other day explaining that if we want to see new wine in new wineskins we need to think in term of “reverse engineering”. As olive oil and the fruit of the grape comes only through crushing, we need to submit to the crushing of the Lord.

A Community of Confession  

The Lord showed me some years ago that when those who “bear the marks of Jesus on their body” (Gal 6:17) come together his glory would be seen in our city[33]. Given this, you can imagine my excitement when I asked an old friend about the preaching of a pastor I’d recently reconnected with, and he described it as “transparent”. Seeing this pastor the other day I checked it out with him in person and he told his preaching team unhesitatingly “hang out their dirty linen”[34]. It appears they have been taught the powerful but rarely grasped secret that mutual confession is an indispensable key to experiencing the power of the washing of the blood of the Lamb.[35] Once upon a time, when Christians came to church[36] they anticipated to be led by their priest/pastor/elder in a General Confession[37] and to hear from him/her as a representative of Christ words of absolution i.e. a declaration of their full forgiveness[38]. Tragically, the original vision of the great Protestant Reformers of the Church as a “priesthood of all believers” was never realised because they substituted a preaching priesthood of pastors for the sacerdotal/mediatorial priesthood of the mass. This error[39] continues to strangle the flourishing of real Christian community amongst Protestants (“many little popes”)[40], and is generally most visible in Pentecostal circles.

There has been such a dramatic cultural shift in Western Christianity that General Confession seems totally alien to our emaciated individualistic mindset. Churches taken captive by the “seeker sensitive” approach have stripped out of their “services”[41] anything that might indicate that we are “miserable sinners”[42] in desperate need of divine mercy. We have become conditioned to think of “confession” as something we do in private, whereas the language of confession used in scripture, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” (1 John 1:9) is used throughout the New Testament of public acknowledgment[43]. In its abandonment of General Confession the Church has been robbed of an important means of grace for it is natural, or “supernatural” if you prefer, for Christians to want to confess, I believe this because confession-and-absolution images the life of Jesus portrayed in the gospel of death-and-resurrection.

Confession and the Shape of the Gospel

Adam fell into sin by exchanging the Fatherhood of God for the fatherhood of the devil[44] so sharing in Satan’s condemnation and endless self-obsession[45]. Whereas Satan aspired to a greater “Godlikeness without God”, Jesus has revealed access to the courts of heaven comes through selfless sacrifice for others. We can only be exalted around the throne of God through sharing in how Jesus himself was “raised…far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come” (Eph 1:21). We must be first humbled by God in order to be exalted by his Spirit. The biblical truth, “Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you…. Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you” (James 4:10; 1 Pet 5:6) is as invariable/unchanging as the gospel, because it is a gospel promise.

Prayer for sick Christians is common, but the biblical format for doing this is severely neglected. The Lord’s brother (James) tells us, “Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise. 14 Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. 15 And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up[46]. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. 16 Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed[47]. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.” (James 5:13-16). The atmosphere enveloping prayer for the afflicted is a gospel atmosphere, for confession is a participation in the lowliness of the cross and the language “the Lord will raise him up” points to healing a release of resurrection power[48]. The application of this invariable gospel sequence to the Church and its prayers for revival became fully clear to me as I was preparing today’s talk.

In preparing this message I came across a story concerning John “Praying Hyde” a man who commonly spent all night in prayer[49]. One day he came in quite late to a conference meeting where he was scheduled to be the main speaker, waiting for the singing to finish, she hared that he had just been in the midst of a “controversy with God” with respect to sharing some of his desperate conflicts with sin and how God have given him victory. When he shared his story and concluded with the exhortation bowing his head, “Let us have a season of prayer.”, there was an outbreak of men crying out to God for mercy and help. There was no hype nor emotionalism involved because the Spirit of God was sharing with the congregation what he had been sharing with Hyde, a deeper union with the death and resurrection of Christ in confession and forgiveness.

J Sidlow Baxter was a man whose heart was made alive to God through a journey of prayer when the Spirit cut inside him, as he says, “like a daggers blade”[50]. He testifies against himself by sharing, “at the end of that hour, if you had asked me” “Have you had a good time? I would have had to reply, “No, it has been a wearying wrestle with contrary emotions and a wayward imagination from beginning to end.”….this battle with his emotions continued for between two and three weeks, but Baxter emerged as a man of enduring spiritual vitality. To enter the zone Hyde, Baxter and many others have been plunged into involves obedience to a painful call. In this zone you will see and sense things you don’t want to, things which will get you into trouble.

Confession and Absolution

If Adam sought to rule all things by grasping after godlikeness apart from faith Christ, reversed this disposition in going through a total change of status through humility and exaltation (Phil 2:5-11)[51].  Such dispositions are still needed in the Church today.

Some years ago, after hearing a revered brother was coming to speak at the Perth Convention Centre (David Wilkerson) I took the initiative to plan some prayer gatherings that happened in the half hour or so before he spoke. On the last day the Spirit signalled to those praying in the prayer room that a disturbance was coming. Sure enough, when the worship time came the song leader[52] led us for 20 minutes or so in rousing choruses, which became more and more disturbing as I noticed there was no mention of the Father, Son, or Spirit or the cross but plenty of talk about our/my devotion to God. I turned to a brother next to me and said, “We need to get on our knees and pray because the spirit of antichrist has taken over this meeting.” So we did just that. Meanwhile many of those present went really strange as they “worshipped God” in some sort of spirit that definitely was not Holy. After that occasion I received a number of emails from mature intercessors asking me what was going on that was so out of order in that meeting. The so-called “worship leader” had no revelation to lead us in the direction of humiliation and confession.

Confession is indispensable to a holy life. Through it we come to pray in assured faith as it imparts the presence of Christ way beyond its own time. In Psalm 32, David describes how his bones were wasting away and his groaning was perpetual day and night until he acknowledged his sin and uncovered his iniquity through confession. Unsurprisingly, because the psalm is really about the cross and exaltation of Jesus, the psalm ends with a prophetic share in the resurrection victory of Christ, “Be glad in the Lord, and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart!” (cf. Luke 24:41). Any sin, however small to us, is a spiritual violation of the holiness of God’s Fatherhood (John 17:11) and should call us to cry out for the blessing of forgiveness. Who amongst us[53] has the courage to pray with David for the cleansing of their body as the temple of the Spirit, “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!” (Ps 139:23-24)[54].

The Puritans were holy men who kept “short accounts” with God. William Fenner a Puritan of the 17^th century testifies, “as we sinne daily, so he justifieth dayly, and we must dayly go to him for it….We must every day eye the brazen serpent…O let us sue out every day a dayly pardon. better sleep in a house full of adders and venomous beasts than sleep in one sinne. The greatest preacher of the nineteenth century, Charles Spurgeon, unashamedly said, “For a successful season of prayer the best beginning is confession.” (Charles Spurgeon)[55].

Conclusion

Humanity’s need for the God revealed in Jesus is total, and Christ’s passionate life is the total revelation of that need, a revelation he sovereignly chooses to reveal only to the Church[56]. The one factor which stops us from “proclaim(ing) the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.” (1 Pet 2:9 cf. Acts 26:18) is our unbelief about what God has already fully and finally accomplished for us in Christ. The sure and certain remedy for our unbelief is to confess it, but in popular/mainstream Christian culture to confess sin seems shameful because we have been convinced by the devil that sin and shame must mean guilt. The lack of communities of confession is a sure sign that a layer of shame has descended over the pastors/leaders of the Church in Perth. But in Christ there can be no shame in confessing sins.  I used to ask my students this question, “At the Last Judgement, will all your sins be on open display for the world to see?[57] Unsurprisingly, the class always went silent. The answer, an answer which will bring to God in Christ the greatest glory, is “All our sins will be revealed, as forgiven sins!”[58] How ecstatically wonderful. The glory of full forgiveness is the glory which we will indwell forever and ever.  This is the lens through which we must zealously embrace confession as the key to revival.