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Remedies

What's your excuse for not praying for revival?

Now the Spirit expressly says that in latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons, speaking lies in hypocrisy, have their own conscience seared with a hot iron…

  - 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[1]

Loss of what is good, heaping up of what is bad: 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 and cried out for God for “remedies to relieve them.”

He pleaded with 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.

Some of those men – such as Columbanus – were trained and prepared for this great work by those whom Gildas had taught and encouraged through his writings.

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. The remedies we require at every level of our society, and in every sector of it, will come from the sovereign pleasure of God, or not at all.

Our nation is captive to false teachings, both in the civil arena and in the churches of the land. The sins of our unbelieving society are well known and duly decried. Then again, why should they surprise or dismay us? Sinning is what sinners do. Look at yourself.

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 little effective spiritual vision, 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.

The gospel embraced in too many churches is not the Gospel of Patrick, Colum Cille, Gildas, and Columbanus. It’s not the Gospel of the Kingdom, but another gospel, a weakened, withdrawn, and withered palliative against the uncertainties and discomforts of our age in flight from God.

It can only soothe us against these; it is no remedy for our ills.

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

Beginning with faithful men – men of prayer.

Where are the faithful men who will call the Church back to her true Gospel roots? Where are the men who pray for revival – in themselves, their churches, and our world – and who are willing to join with other men to seek this greatest of all remedies? 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?

Christian man, look in the mirror: God is 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

The skin of a reason

Christian men today are not lacking reasons for why they cannot find the time to pray for revival and to join with other men to pray for revival. Even though God commands it (see Men of the Church: A Solemn Call), even though we have plenty of historical evidence to encourage us to this challenge, and even though opportunities abound for men to take up this most-needed remedy for what ails us – still, Christian men refuse to respond. They have plenty of reasons. But those reasons sound more like the excuses we hear in the parable of the great feast (Lk. 14.16-22). Jim Kennedy (that most-excellent Celt) used to tell us, “An excuse is just the skin of a reason, stuffed with a lie.”

Christian man, what’s your excuse for not making daily, earnest prayer for revival a central component in your walk with and work for the Lord?

The Celtic Revival, which lasted four centuries, began with one man praying. Patrick, under intense conviction from God, prayed, he tells us, as many as a hundred times a day for God’s reviving grace. God answered his prayers. He will answer ours.

If we will pray them.

Men, go to the website, www.ailbe.org, and sign-up to receive our weekly prayer letter, Men at Prayer. It’s a start.

Psalms to Pray for Today and Tuesday
Today
Morning: Psalm 119.17-24; Psalm 99
Evening: Psalm 25

Tuesday
Morning: Psalm 119.25-32; Psalm 100
Evening: Psalm 26
T. M. Moore, Principal
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All Psalms for singing from The Ailbe Psalter. Scripture taken from the New King James Version. © Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.



[1]Winterbottom, p. 13.

T.M. Moore

T. M. Moore is principal of The Fellowship of Ailbe, a spiritual fellowship in the Celtic Christian tradition. He and his wife, Susie, make their home in the Champlain Valley of Vermont.
Books by T. M. Moore

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