This Is What Spiritual Revival Looks Like

<![CDATA[For over 30 years, Greg Laurie, the pastor of my home church, Harvest Christian Fellowship, has held Crusades in Southern California annually in order to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ and bring people to faith. It's been his passion for his entire life in ministry. My amazing wife and I volunteered to help work at this year's outreach in July, because without volunteers, the logistical nightmare of staging such an event would be insurmountable. We were eager to help out. What we saw there on a Friday night in July was something I've never seen before. 50,000 people tried to fit into a stadium that held a smidge over 43,000. Orange County Fire Authority officials ordered the gates closed, and thousands watched from the parking lot on screens around the various promenades of Angels Stadium. Many others just listened. Inside, when Pastor Greg gave the altar call, thousands of people filled the aisles and made their way to the field. In a Harvest Crusade first, they had to close off access to the field because there were simply too many people on it. There was no room for more. There were no complaints. No riots or fights. People just stayed in the aisles where they were and prayed. Over 5,500 people made public professions of faith that night, with thousands more getting baptized a couple weeks later at a beach in Newport Harbor called Pirate's Cove. Laurie's preaching of late has had an overarching theme - that we need another spiritual revival in this country if it has any chance to survive for any length of time. That prayer for revival has been repeated in lots of churches and mid-week Bible studies for a very long time. Many Christians say the words, but may not have fully appreciated what it might look like if God did answer that prayer. We are seeing that in real time. And not just here in the United States, but globally. The world witnessed undeniable acts of evil that bookended last week. First, the surveillance video of the Lynx Blue Line in Charlotte, North Carolina showing Demarcos Brown, Jr. stabbing 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska to death with a pocketknife and then pronouncing, "we got that white girl, we got that white girl", dripping Zarutska's blood from his knife as he walked. And on Wednesday, we all were witnesses to the assassination and martyrdom of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University in Orem. To some on the progressive left, especially in the case of the murder of Kirk, this was cheered and celebrated. But to most people, even those not previously holding any religious beliefs, this was a seminal point in history. They saw evil up close. It scared them. They were repulsed by it. In one example I believe to be a microcosm of the explosion of faith taking place all across the globe, it propelled them to take sides, even if they didn't know fully what the side they were choosing might hold in store. ]]>