Searching for Reality

I remember the time I was invited to preach the chapel service for a Christian high school, and as I spoke, the kids were paying me no never mind. They were on their phones, they were talking and laughing with each other. A couple of girls on the front row made fun of me the whole time I was up there.

I couldn't have moved those kids if I had a steamroller that day. When I was done, the pastor of the school came over to me and he looked at me apologetically and said, I feel sorry for these kids. They don't know what it's like to experience God at a meeting.

When I was a young pastor in the early 1970s, there was a touch of revival in the land, and I remember the presence of God was so thick at church, he didn't want to leave to go home. We were at church all odd hours of the night, praying and weeping and basking in his glory. It just breaks my heart that these kids don't know anything about that.

Well, I agreed with him, and this generation of our youth today need God more than ever. They have grown up in church, and they leave church as soon as they hit college age. They're leaving the church in droves because there is no reality of God there.

We have failed in our efforts to reach these kids with Jesus. We caved in to their demands and changed our worship service for them to be more like the world. We gave our teenage youth groups movie nights and pizza nights, and we gave them what they wanted instead of giving them what they needed.

We quit preaching against sin so they don't even know what sin is. They have no problem sleeping with each other and see nothing wrong with drinking alcohol or smoking weed. But the main reason they do all that is the fact they are not escaping from reality, but quite the opposite.

They are searching for reality. They grew up in a home with a double standard. They grew up under the parenting that said, do as I say instead of do as I do.

They saw that their parents acted one way at church on Sunday and behaved at home, quite the opposite, during the week, and the kids saw right through our hypocrisy. They left the church because it wasn't real. We thought if we gave them the music they wanted and recreational church activities, we could hang on to our kids, but we were wrong.

When the teenagers realized that the parents had no living reality of God in their lives, then religion just became a sham to them. I remember a church that went through this and came out on the other side. First, it began with the men.

Some of the men of the church began to get serious with God, and they rededicated their lives to the Lord Jesus. Then their wives noticed a change in the home. Their husbands were more tender toward them and more patient with them and more loving toward them, and they took the spiritual lead in the home by having daily devotions with their wives.

Well, soon this spread to the women of the church, where when they saw what it was like to have a godly husband, they became more godly wives, and they rededicated their lives to the Lord Jesus. Well, soon this was too much for the teenagers in the home, as they saw for the first time what it was like to have two real godly parents living for the Lord. So the teenagers began to get saved one after another.

That church eventually was turned upside down in revival, as the reality of God was there. There was a power of God in the meetings, and the kids didn't want to go home. They just wanted to stay at church and soak in the atmosphere of the reality of Almighty God.

In Psalm 110.3 it reads that people should be willing in the day of that power when God shows up. It makes all the difference in the world, friends, but it began with the men of the home. They got serious with God, and he got serious with them.

How about you, friend? Are you searching for reality? God says, return to me, and I will return to you. Every revival begins with a personal revival, and revival can never come without an exposure of and judgment on sin. Are you ready for reality?