I have lingered at home this morning to pray. My heart is broken, I am "hemmed in" as David said in Psalm 139. I so much want revival, but not revival. I want the Spirit of God. I want the fullness of God. I want to be His broken vessel, filled as it pleases Him. Even saying that sounds like a sales pitch to me. I want Jesus in the most complete way that He wants me to know Him but I am unable to ask Him because I cannot even come up with the words for it.
I am confessing all known sin. And I have sin. I have tax and student loan debts I can't pay, for one, due to a decision years ago to walk away from ministry (I was a licensed minister in our former denomination) and consequent selfish and foolish decisions that have extremely long reach. I have a career that I turned my back on God for and that I utterly hate and cannot escape. I have decided some time ago that enduring this is my assignment. Now, I am burdened, literally, with this holy hunger for God and I am in no small agony in want of Him. My wife is experiencing this, too.
I have poorly managed many things in life. I have poorly managed my own heart. And, while I have walked in repentance of these things for some time, I see no change or relief or release. In fact, I'm not even seeking relief or release. I want Jesus, fully, completely.
If you read my post last week in What In the World is God Doing?, this is my heart. God is willing, able to immediately come down and displace everything so that people are made to come alive in Him. I know we can't "pray revival down", but we can pray and God does come down mightily. He is a wind and a fire, and if you know anything about wind and fire, you know it cannot be managed or controlled. I pray for the Holy Spirit to come as a fire and a wind in my heart and in my home.
I am, as much as I am consciously aware, putting away any questionable practice. To the point that I am ready to forego even simple TV viewing of sports and news just so I don't pollute my heart with them. To the point that I am ready to stop eating and to watch what I do eat and how much. I want to be cleansed of affection for my own self. I want true Holy Ghost power.
I simply am at the end of myself and don't know what to do. If I could, I'd just rapture out of here. :). (Don't take that as a rapture theology. I'm just saying what is in my heart.) I want so much to set aside every weight, but there seem some too heavy, too cumbersome, too large to set aside. I can't come clean. I must be set free by The Lord. I'm not talking of secret lusts, etc., although I'm open to being corrected and repenting on that too as I become aware. I'm saying that circumstantially I am hemmed in and that my heart's desire to pursue Christ and to make Him known to everyone around me meets with obstacles that I cannot clear.
Beyond myself is my prayer for our whole city to be brought to repentance. The churches, ours included, must turn from cultural Christianity and to true faith and holiness. We need to be made alive because, on the whole, we are dead in our transgressions, blinded by the cares of this life, fattened in our own lust for ease and material plenty and entertainment and substances that intoxicate that we can't move. We are naked but clothed in self righteousness. Churches are built every few hundred yards, and we are in the so called Bible Belt, but we are as lost as any Sodom or Gomorrah.
Churches are black holes that suck all the light of the gospel from the air of the larger community. They monopolize Jesus and claim "sola ussa", if I can coin a fake Latin phrase. Us alone! We are right! We are self indulgent and have more light and understanding of God's Word! Oh God how sick of us You must be! I'm sick enough of us, I know He must find our holy exercises as unholy hammers of the nails into the hands and feet of His Son.
I'm sick of me. I'm sick of this flesh driven existence. I'm hemmed in and want to be free in Him.
I'm in a bad way, and ask for your prayers for me, my family and the church we belong to and for our hometowns.