When I was on the Bible faculty of a Christian academy a few years back, I was given the responsibility of organizing the chapel services. I recall - to my great surprise - of being chastised by a student for not having enough music during the service.
"But we have music for the first twenty minutes,"I replied.
"It's not enough," he retorted. "It needs to be at least an hour. We want a revival to start."
"You understand," I said, "that the entire chapel service is only sixty minutes long."
"It doesn't matter," he answered back. "We need more time to get into the Spirit."
After I questioned him longer, he told me that in his home church, the congregation felt it necessary to have a music/praise service for a minimum of two hours "in order to get into the Spirit. We want revival and that's the way it comes about."
Now, I am not sure what this young man feels about the Scripture, but when I challenged him to show me a passage in the Bible where a revival (by his definition of an outpouring of the convicting power of the Holy Spirit) was brought about by a musical event, he stared at me blankly.
We had recently had a school activity where some students openly flaunted the rules and the result was a minor scandal among the student body. I pointed this out, saying, "We as the faculty did everything we could in confronting the rule-breakers, including punishment. You students have talked about this with one another. Yet not one of the students of this school has stepped forward to confront these guys, who still remain unrepentant. And you know, every revival I have read about in the Bible started with the recognition, confession and repentance of sin. My friend, that's what you need to do as a peer and fellow Christian. If you feel so strongly about wanting to see revival within this school, go and deal - in the Matthew 18 principle - with these troublemakers who call themselves Christians but are still rebellious. Talk with them. Pray with them. But you gotta deal with it."
He looked at me blankly and left the room. He never confronted any of the rule breakers. Nor did any other student in the school.
Revival never came.
