We Need To Stop Fooling Ourselves!

O Lord, come back to us!  How long will you delay?  Take pity on your servants!  Satisfy us each morning with your unfailing love, so we may sing for joy to the end of our lives.  Give us gladness in proportion to our former misery!  Replace the evil years with good.  Let us, your servants, see you work again; let our children see your glory.  And may the Lord our God show us his approval and make our efforts successful.  Yes, make our efforts successful! [Psalm 90.13-17]

In my journey with the LORD, there is rarely a day that I don't look at the Bible and the interaction God demonstrated with His people and then wonder, "Why don't we see God move like that today?"

It could be argued that my eyes are simply closed.  Or, perhaps I am not attending the right meetings or living in the right country...

But I don't think that is it.  No, in my journey on this earth, I have not seen the interaction with God that the Bible details.  I have indeed witnessed what I felt was the presence of God, but frankly, that was all there was to it - a feeling.  I will not argue that that feeling was a good feeling, and in and of itself worth pursuing, but there was no manifestation beyond that - certainly nothing tangible.

I have witnessed what I believe were miracles, but even those could be explained otherwise by naysayers - nothing like God speaking from a mountain or anything.  Likewise I have witnessed lives changed as people sought the LORD, but I have never witnessed a blind person begin to see.  And while I have seen people recover on occasion from serious illnesses, I have neither witnessed an instant remedy to a physical problem nor certainly ever seen a dead person raised to life.

Religious people all seem to have some explanation for this.  Some say God simply doesn't do those things any more, while others have convinced themselves that every sniffle of the nose that goes away after several days is a miracle of God.  I don't buy either explanation.  I think we need something that God calls 'revival' - not something that we call 'revival!'  We need to stop fooling ourselves!!

Father, LORD, come back to us! How long will you delay? Take pity on your servants! Satisfy us each morning with your unfailing love, so we may sing for joy to the end of our lives. Give us gladness in proportion to our former misery! Replace the evil years with good. Let us, your servants, see you work again; let our children see your glory. And may the Lord our God show us his approval and make our efforts successful. Yes, make our efforts successful!