THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL

- author unknown

{Vital insights into God's preparations for Revival - ed.}

"If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then will l hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land".

- 2 Chronicles 7:14.

________________________

Another key similarity between revival and nuclear

fission is a strange phenomenon that occurs right

before the atom splits. The nucleus actually depresses.

Scientists observe that the neutron bombardment

which seemed to be changing the nucleus, now shows

no sign of reaching critical mass. Nothing seems to be

happening.

That is also what happens right before a manifestation

of God's glory. The revival core will be praying and

sensing a rising tide of power and expectancy. All of a sudden, you hit a brick wall. The power is gone. God's

presence seems to have lifted. Your prayers feel trapped in your mouth. A deep despair settles in. You feel physically drained.

This is the dark night of the soul. This is where every revival pioneer has been before you and now it's

your turn. It will take everything in you to keep

moving. The sobering fact is that many who have

reached the dark night of the soul have retreated.

Eternity will reveal a long, sad history of revival

near-misses.

Let me state emphatically that 90% of revival is

getting to the point where an unshakeable resolve (firm determination to do something) is born.

Everything you have done before you reach this

dark night will seem unimportant. It is what you do

now that makes or breaks your heart's desire.

At no other time does God express love more than

when He allows this time of total emptiness. God risks

being misunderstood. He faces the potential of one of

His children walking away frustrated and confused, but

He believes the good it will produce is well worth the

risk.

What do you do when this cloud of darkness settles

on you?

Scientists respond to a depressed nucleus by intensifying the neutron beam (fire), and resolve to do so until fission occurs. They commit to keep moving, not relying on any physical signs. That is precisely what we must do to see the end of this night.

Why does God allow this dark night? I strongly believe

that our Father realized that those through whom He works to bring revival receive great praise from the church and awesome attacks from Satan. A person lacking humility won't survive the praise of men. A person without perseverance won't overcome Satan. The revival core must realize this and stand the test. Just as a scientist turns up the force of the neutron beam even though he sees no result, so true revivalists will turn up their prayer during the dark night of the soul. If the children of God demonstrate that they

won't go by what they see or feel, God will know that

He has vessels that will not rely on circumstances or

feelings to keep them on a straight course.

If the prayer of the revival core continues during this

dark night, their true motive surfaces. The only thing

that will hold us when the nucleus depresses is a pure

heart of love for the lost and a true desire to see God

glorified. God wisely observes that anyone who survives this night is rightfully suited to invade enemy

territory.

Again we see this fifth stage in our key verse,

2 Chronicles 7:14, "...will humble themselves and pray,

and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways...'

It would seem that by this stage, God would know we

have abandoned our sin. The issue, however, is something deeper; it deals with our ways.

Our repentance has dealt with what we have done; now the purification focuses on what we are.

The psalmist distinguished two aspects of God: His acts and His ways. "He made known his ways to Moses, his

deeds to the people of Israel" (Psalm 103:7).

The children of Israel only knew God from miracle to

miracle, but Moses knew the deep intentions and the

long-range plan of God. Moses understood the essence, heartbeat and direction of God. To turn from our wicked ways doesn't just mean to repent of our sins. Hitherto, we have repented of our acts, now we need deliverance from our ways.

Gethsemane was the dark night of the soul for Jesus

Christ; it was the test of His ways. You wonder if

Jesus had to repent. The answer is no, but He had to

be examined in His Father's court of justice.

The dark night of the soul is a very baffling test, for it comes at a least expected time and with special

conditions. The inner nature must be surprised, caught

off guard, in order to be exposed and conquered.

In the many records of revival, there is an almost

uniform description of this crucible... on the mountain

top one moment, feeling run over by a train the next.

Joseph, barely recovered from a glorious dream, is

thrown into a pit by his brothers. David, still hearing

the chant of the throng saying, 'Saul has slain his

thousands and David his ten thousands,' wakes up in a

cave being hunted like an animal.

Even Jesus, with the hosannas still ringing in His

ears from the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, now

prays alone, cold, tormented, sweating blood, and

surrounded by sleeping disciples.

The battlements of heaven are waiting for that

unmistakable ring of genuine obedience where the dragon of human nature has been met and beheaded.

"Not my will but thy will be done!"

Before the crown comes the bitter cup. It must be

swallowed to the bitter dregs.

So then, what is the Lord really looking for? A servant who knows that the cup cannot pass. Take heart if you wish that it would pass. Even Jesus asked

if it was necessary to drink. But He did not ask to

escape because of fear of pain or selfishness. He asked

because, for the first time in eternity, He would be

separated from His Father. He knew that the plan to

save man would have to break His Father's heart. Only

Abraham and Isaac on Mount Moriah could begin to

understand the grief.

Herein lies the truth that releases the glory. In repenting of sin, we rid ourselves of evil but in the

dark night of the soul, we surrender the things we

dearly love, things we can't readily identify as being in

conflict with God.

Here the issue is not right and wrong, but high and

low purposes of living. Spiritual awakening is not simply getting rid of sin, it is giving God what He wants.

Again and again I have tried to stress that we must conclude with iron resolve that there is no substitute for revival. It is the higher ground we must reach because the flood is rising. No point of return can exist, no alternative can be considered.

For fire to fall and consume the sacrifice, it must be

innocent and without blemish, but, most of all, it must

be on the altar to stay.

Under every other circumstance our nature can hide,

but in this dark night it screams for its way, and its

many tentacles are exposed.

The protest was immediate. "Why this waste?"

screamed the apostles, led by Judas Iscariot. Their

outrage was almost convincing. The ointment was

worth a year's salary (maybe $12,000 today). It could

have been used to have fed the poor, they argued

(actually, Judas wanted to steal it). This is the entire issue with revival. They wanted to do something for God. Mary knew it was time to do

something for God.

The time has come to pour out our best on God. Jesus

said, "The poor you have with you always." Good deeds

are always available.

America is spiritually dying because God has sales reps and not channels of His glory. We feverishly do the right things, almost as a bribe to postpone the needed pouring out of ourselves as a living sacrifice.

Again we must no longer see the bad things as barriers

to revival, but the seemingly good. We can't dole out precious ointment to the poor in doses that don't cure them or honor God. We must be poured out on God!

Spiritual awakening means that the faithful become

fiery, the decent become dynamic, and the acceptable

become excellent. But, most of all, we become

disgusted with our evil, and totally dissatisfied with our

good.

We realize that now is the time to pull out all the

stops. No program is sacred, no worthy project is

worth enough. None of the ointment can be spared. It

is revival or death!

As I said before, the nucleus of the atom depresses

right before fission and in that lies another key parallel

to revival... the nucleus explodes from that depressed

condition. It does not split when it looks inflated and

energetic but rather when it is shrunken and lifeless.

Revival comes out of nowhere by sovereign timing.

The prayer core is ready to fall from exhaustion but

hangs on by its confidence in the faithfulness of God.

Jehovah detects that special quality that can be

rewarded with revival.

An eviction notice falls with a loud crash on the porch of the local satanic supervisor. Angels receive their

invasion orders. The prayer core looks up and sees the glory coming. The roar of God is about to be heard in the land once more....

The Apple Of His Eye

10/14/05

Sometimes the apple of His eye

Sometimes His child of thunder

As a bullock unaccustomed to the yoke

This child of thunder must be broke

The spirit fights to keep the flesh under

Gaining the victory over the child of thunder

While both emotions are driven by zeal

the flesh is incapable of standing still

but the spirit is content to wait on God’s will

The spirit within ignites with passion

It freely loves and spills over with compassion

My soul’s deepest desire is to serve my Lord

So my flesh must surrender and be in one accord

This constant struggle between the two

Is not strange, nor is it new

It is what all dear-saints must go through

The closer I draw to thee, oh Lord

The more easily my flesh is ignored

Though the battle continues to rage within

I am persuaded my spirit will triumph in the end

The apple of His eye or His child of thunder

The flesh is a force to be reckoned with

so I reckon I’ll keep him under

What is a Christian?

What is a Christian June, 1986

So many people label themselves Christians today, without due consideration as to what it means to exhibit the name of Christ, it is a very solemn matter to call oneself a Christian. It certainly carries a great responsibility; our countenance is our greatest testimony and a reflection of our Lord and savior to a lost world.

The Christian life is a continuous growing and cleansing process through the word.

There are many different stages in a Christian life, from the innocence of newborn to the weathered, tried and true but never perfected. However the heart is in a continuous pursuit of communion with its creator, for which it was created, unbroken communion is the key that opens Heaven’s gate, If truly Jesus lives within, Love, mercy, compassion and forgiveness will shine through, because “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.”

Victory over sin

Christians who learn to hate their sin will never give themselves over to its power.

Worship in the midst of your failure. This is victory!

A Democracy

A must read;

There still are more of us (conservatives) than there are of them (liberals)

This is why words have lost their meaning in Washington;

Obama's Two-Front Offensive With the election of Barack Obama as president, the liberals have launched a massive, two-front offensive they believe will end in victory. They have judged that our public education system is so degraded that only a few Americans are left who even understand what a democracy is, and how the free market actually works. They are convinced that the majority of Americans are too frightened by the current recession to care about preserving the principles that made us the most powerful, productive and innovative country the world has ever known. In short, the liberals are reaching for victory because they believe that history now is on their side.

Revolution

During the last 30 years we Americans have been so politically divided that some of us have called this left-right, liberal-conservative split a "culture war" or even a "second Civil War." These descriptions are no longer accurate. The precise, technical word for what is happening in the United States today is revolution.

Because of our country's history, we tend to think of revolutions as

Military conflicts, and of the revolutionaries as the good guys; the image of Minutemen fighting valiantly against the British forces at Lexington and Concord lies deep within our DNA. But sometimes -- quite often, actually -- revolutions aren't military conflicts, and the good guys are the ones trying to keep the revolution from happening. In January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany by its elected president; he would spend the next two years consolidating his power with the legislative connivance of his political allies in the Reichstag. In October 1917, Lenin and his

Bolsheviks took control of Russia from Kerensky and his Social Democrats -- who had overthrown the Czar earlier that year -- entirely through parliamentary maneuvering in Russia's fledgling Duma.

What defines a revolution -- and this is the crucial point to grasp – is that when it's over a country has changed not merely its leaders and its laws, but its operating system.

Since most of us think of computers when we hear the phrase "operating system" let me use this analogy to illuminate my point:

Every computer has an operating system, and most of us are using either the Microsoft or the Apple operating system. If you want to do something with your computer -- send an email, watch a DVD, read an online essay like this one -- you must do it the way your computer's operating system is designed to work.

No operating system is perfect, which is why Microsoft and Apple send updates to their customers from time to time. And every so often these companies launch new versions of their operating systems that incorporate a lot of modifications at once. Can you change the operating system you use?

Of course you can. Two years ago I threw out every Microsoft-based machine in our company's office and replaced them with Apple products. Last month I met a corporate CEO who had just done the opposite, and replaced the Apple computers in his office with ones that run on the Microsoft operating system.

Democracies and Dictatorships

Now, just as computers have operating systems so too do countries. In fact, countries have dual operating systems - one political and the other economic. Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of each: Politically you can be a democracy or a dictatorship, and economically you can have either a free market or a command economy. Because countries don't buy their operating systems off the shelf, the way we buy our computer operating systems, each country develops its own versions. This is why our country's democracy is somewhat different from Canada's, which in turn is slightly different from Australia's, and so forth. These countries all have free-market economies, but again they aren't quite the same. Still, the similarities among democracies and free-market economies are more striking than the differences. Likewise, while no two dictatorships are the same, and no two command economies work in exactly the same way, the differences among them are comparatively trivial.

Since no country's operating systems are perfect, can they be improved? Of course they can. Every time our Congress passes a new law, or enacts a new regulation -- or whenever the Supreme Court issues an opinion -- that's the equivalent of an update to our political or economic operating system. Can you change a country's operating system? Yes, you can. And the precise, technical word for replacing one political or economic operating system with another is -- revolution.

When politics in a democracy is normal, the political parties all agree to preserve the operating system while they compete to improve it. This is what is actually happening when one party in Congress introduces a new piece of healthcare or education legislation and the other party opposes it or introduces its own healthcare or education bill, or when two candidates for the Senate argue over whether or not to change our immigration laws. Honorable people often will disagree about what to do -- sometimes quite strongly, just as the software engineers at Microsoft and Apple will sometimes argue through the night about whether a proposed change in the operating system's code is an improvement or just "kludge." But in normal politics the outer limits of all these disagreements are marked by a shared commitment to preserving and improving the operating system.

In abnormal politics, the objective of one party isn't to improve the operating system, but to overthrow it. With this analogy in mind, now we can see clearly what's been happening in the United States during the last three decades. While conservatives have been working to improve our democracy and our free-market economy, liberals have been working to replace our democracy with a dictatorship, and our free-market economy with a command economy controlled by the government. The liberals couldn't say this aloud, because if they did the American people would have tossed them out of office on their ears. So the liberals worked covertly, feigning support for democracy and for the free market while working diligently to undermine both.

This is why our politics has been so partisan, so vicious, and so deadlocked. This is why words have lost their meaning in Washington, why we can never get to the bottom of anything, why we lurch from one manufactured scandal to another. It's all been part of a decades-long effort by the liberals to throw sand in our eyes -- to keep us from seeing clearly where they really want to take us. (And this explains why, when we question their judgment on some issue, they go berserk and accuse us of questioning their patriotism. They're afraid we're on the verge of catching on. If you want to have some fun, the next time you're chatting with a liberal and he goes nuts when you call him a socialist, say to him: "I'm so sorry you're offended. Please tell me, what is there about socialism you don't like?" You won't get a coherent answer; he'll just accuse you of a hate crime.)

Obama's Two-Front Offensive With the election of Barack Obama as president, the liberals have launched a massive, two-front offensive they believe will end in victory. They have judged that our public education system is so degraded that only a few Americans are left who even understand what a democracy is, and how the free market actually works. They are convinced that the majority of Americans are too frightened by the current recession to care about preserving the principles that made us the most powerful, productive and innovative country the world has ever known. In short, the liberals are reaching for victory because they believe that history now is on their side.

The speed of their offensive is breathtaking.

At the core of democracy is the rule of law, and we have already lost it. The liberals lecture us incessantly that everything is "relative," but that's not true; some things are absolutes. You cannot claim to be faithful to your spouse because you never cheat on her -- except when you're in London on business. And you cannot claim to have the rule of law if the government can set aside the rule of law when it decides that "special circumstances" have arisen that warrant illegality. When the President and his aides handed ownership of Chrysler Corp. to the United Auto Workers union, they tried to avoid sending that beleaguered company into bankruptcy by muscling its bondholders into accepting less money for their assets than the law entitled them to collect. These contracts, and the law under which they were signed, were mere obstacles to a thuggish President bent on paying off his political supporters.

It's going to get much worse, fast. President Obama has told us time and again that among his criteria for choosing Federal judges will be "empathy." Empathy is a wonderful quality in any human being, but a judge's job is to rule according to the law. Once our courts are presided over by judges who will reach verdicts based on how they feel about an issue -- such as abortion or the right of citizens to bear arms -- the law will be whatever the judges wish it to be; the rule of law will become an empty phrase rather than the architecture of our civilization.

We have lost our free-market economy as quickly as we have lost the rule of law. Money is to an economy what blood is to a body; life and death resides within the organ that controls its flow. The government already owns our country's leading banks, which means the government now controls our economy. (And in all fairness to President Obama, it was the Bush administration that started us down this ghastly road.) One indicator of the Obama administration's real objective: When some banks that had taken federal money attempted to repay their loans, the Treasury Department refused to accept repayment and step aside. This shows the government's goal isn't to prop up the banks, but rather to control them.

Here, too, things are going to get much worse, fast.

The government now owns General Motors Corp., is reaching for control of insurance companies, and has launched plans to take over our country's healthcare industry. It even wants authority to set the salaries of executives in industries that, at least for now, aren't being subsidized or underwritten by the government.

Put all this together, and what we have in our country today isn't a democracy and it isn't a free-market economy. Reader, what we have now is a revolution.

This revolution won't be stopped, and our country won't be rescued, by the Republicans in Washington. This isn't because they lack the votes. It's because most of them are careerist hacks who've been playing footsie with the Democrats for too long; with very few exceptions they lack the intellectual firepower to articulate the present danger, and the political courage to stand up to this Administration and really fight. But for the absence of frock coats and pince-nez glasses, these Republicans in Washington remind me of those bumbling Weimar Republic politicians in Berlin who never grasped where Hitler and the Nazis were going until it was too late to stop them, or of those hapless Mensheviks in Moscow's Duma who let themselves be tossed into history's dustbin by Lenin and his Bolsheviks. (Yes, of course I realize it's explosive to keep bringing up the Nazis and the Bolsheviks in an essay about the Democrats. I'm not doing this to be incendiary; I'm doing this to be accurate.)

The Future's in Our Hands

Our country's future now lies within our own hands -- yours, mine, all of us who comprise what the Washington insiders sneeringly call the grass roots. Good, because unless I'm very much mistaken the liberals have over-estimated their strength. There still are more of us than there are of them. I mean ordinary, decent Americans from across the political spectrum who may disagree about specific issues, but who understand who we are and how we became who we are; who love our country, have a genius for self-organizing, and won't let the United States go down without a fight.

We need to launch a counter-offensive, so to speak, and the place to start is at the local level. Working with our county and state political parties when we can -- or working around them when we must -- our objective will be to elect as many people as we can to public office who understand what a democracy is and how the free market works. This will include city council members, county commissioners, school board members, judges, sheriffs and even members of the local parks commission. With the strength and political momentum their elections will provide, we can surge to the state level and then -- before it's too late -- take back the power in Washington DC.

I know this isn't the kind of battle most of us want to fight; we would rather watch the talking heads slug it out on Fox News than stand on a street corner handing out campaign flyers. And given our country's history, for a while it will be uncomfortable to find ourselves fighting against the revolution and for the status quo. But we'll get used to this as we make our case over and over again -- to our friends, our neighbors, at barbeques and PTA meetings and at public rallies like those marvelous April tea parties that drove the liberals insane. And we'll draw strength as our ranks swell with new recruits.

The alternative to launching this kind of peaceful and political counter-attack is horrific. Right now sales of guns and ammunition are rising sharply. This reflects an intuitive grasp by grass-roots Americans of what history teaches may lie ahead. It was only after the Nazis had secured their grip on power in Germany, and only after the Bolsheviks had seized control of Russia, that they set out to disarm and destroy the vast numbers of ordinary citizens who - to the astonishment and fury of the revolutionaries -- just wouldn't go along.

That's when the real shooting started, and when blood began flowing in the streets.