Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared...

   - 1 Timothy 4.1, 2

What I have to deplore with mournful complaint is a general loss of good, a heaping up of bad...I sympathize with my country’s difficulties and troubles, and rejoice in remedies to relieve them.

  -Gildas, The Ruin of Britain, British, 6th century

Gildas might have been writing in our day. Looking back on his native Britain, sometime after the turn of the sixth century, Gildas surveyed the sorry state of civil and ecclesiastical society in his native land and cried out for God to raise up faithful men through whom revival might come. 

He could not have known what would shortly ensue. Before the century was over, Irish peregrini – wandering missionary/scholars – would begin leaving their homeland to proclaim the liberating power of the Gospel to Scotland, Wales, and beyond to the European continent. The effect of their efforts over the next century and a half was to bring revival, renewal, and awakening where previously the darkness of unbelief and sin had long prevailed.

In trying times, desperate times, it’s good to remember that God is sovereign and that His economy – not man’s – governs the course of history.

Our nation is captive to false teachings, both in the civil arena and in the churches of the land. The sins of the former are well known and duly decried. Among the churches, a form of “near Christianity” offers forgiveness of sin and the hope of heaven, together with a measure of happiness and fulfillment here and now, but no determined path to holiness, no taste for self-denial or suffering, and no power for turning rightside-up the morals and culture of our nation.

This is not the Gospel of Patrick, Columba, and Columbanus. It’s not the Gospel of Kingdom, but another gospel, a weakened, withdrawn, and withered palliative against the uncertainties and discomforts of our age in flight from God.

Like Gildas, we look upon our nation and the churches of the land, and plead with God for some “remedies” from His Spirit.

Where are the faithful men who will call the Church back to her true Gospel roots? Where are the men who will take up the mandate to live and to proclaim the Gospel of the Kingdom, to call this generation to repentance, and to lead them in reconciling all things back to God?

Look in the mirror, dear friend: Is God speaking to you?

Psalm 85.4-6 (Lyons: “O Worship the King”)
Restore us, O God, renew us in peace,
And cause all Your wrath against us to cease.
Will You evermore all Your wrath to us show?
Revive us that we may Your joy again know.

Lord, grant that we may gladly lay down whatever we love apart from Christ for the sake of Christ and His Kingdom. Adapted from Columbanus, Sermon X