My Message to a Lost and Perverse Generation

I can't keep quiet. Too much is at stake.

My past! I’ve discussed it at length. I’m not proud of where I came from, but if telling it helps another man repent and turn to God, then I’ll keep on admitting the sins of my youth. Other than a long-lost daughter and a good testimony that might be of benefit to someone else, not much good came out of my past.

I can only think of one other benefit of coming from a place of complete rebellion, and that is once my eyes and heart were pried open by the Almighty, I was able to make a clear distinction between the lies of Satan and the gospel. I guess you could say that I had tried everything the evil one told me to do, and all of it left me empty. There’s no exception to this. My life was in such chaos, God began to look mighty appealing to me. I finally realized that he’d been telling me the truth all along.

Out of that clear-mindedness also came an appreciation for the goodness of God. I knew him to be a hard and vengeful God; the preachers made sure of that. What I didn’t know about him was that he is also a God of love. There I was, wallowing in my lostness, and the God of heaven never wavered in his love for me. Not even on my worst day. He loved me enough to die in my place. Shed his blood for me. You talk about a life-changer — that one turned me away from the demonic lies I’d been listening to for far too long.

Once I found that out, it empowered me to speak about his mercy openly and boldly, and speaking the name of Jesus was no problem. I never obsessed about what the reaction of my audience would be — I just figured they needed to hear about Christ more than they knew, so I told them. I’m still telling people today. I haven’t slowed down one bit.

This isn’t something that grew out of my own strength. Instead, it came out of my confidence that God is who he said he is, that Jesus is the second person in the Godhead, and that he was raised from the dead on my behalf. I was convinced it was true in 1976, and I’m more convinced of it now.

One of the biblical characters who was transformed by his encounter with God was the prophet Isaiah. He had a personal run-in with the Almighty in Isaiah chapter six:

 In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphim, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another:

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty;    the whole earth is full of his glory.”

At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.

Isaiah’s vision of the throne room of God was no picnic. The holiness and majesty of Almighty God drove him to his knees:

“Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”

Isaiah didn’t have the same experience in his encounter with God that some say they have had in their near-death experiences. There was no beautiful white light at the end of a tunnel. There was no robbed grandfather. Just a holy God who struck terror in Isaiah.

So far in this passage, we see the God who is terrible and overwhelming. He is awful (his awe is too much for us), but that is not the end of Isaiah’s encounter with God. Remember what I said earlier that God is also a God of love. He is a mercy-dispensing God. He redeems people out of his incredible love for them.

What God did for Isaiah next is what he did for me. He didn’t send one of his seraphim to touch my lips with a burning ember, but he did wash my sin away and put a message in my mouth.

Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”

And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”

Speaking the name of God to a lost and perverse generation goes with the territory of following after God.  If God acted on mankind’s behalf because of his love for man, then who I am I to keep silent about God’s story of redemption? How can I call myself a follower of God Almighty and his Son, Jesus Christ, and remain silent?

The answer to that question is that I can’t! I can’t keep quiet. Too much is at stake!

I pray that God will work a mighty work of healing for our nation and the modern church. I pray that he will empower men and women to speak his name regardless of the consequences to themselves. Like John the Baptist, Stephen, and the Lord Jesus himself, I long for the powerful voices of rescued men and women to rise up out of the moral wasteland that is around us. 

It’s not too late. We’ve seen great revival before. I pray that we are able to witness it again. Until it happens, I will live by the Jeremiah principle. I’m going to proclaim his work and speak in his name until I cannot speak any more.

“But if I say, “I will not mention his word
or speak anymore in his name,”
his word is in my heart like a fire,
a fire shut up in my bones.
I am weary of holding it in.”

—Jeremiah 20:9