Helpful post today from Tim Keller on revival and the Spirit's work on sleepy and nominal Christians. Here's a teaser...
So how do you wake up sleepy Christians and convert nominal Christians? Let me give you what I would call my modernized American versions of the kinds of questions I would ask people if I was trying to get them to really think about whether or not they know Christ. These questions are adapted from The Experience Meeting by William Williams, based on the Welsh revivals during the Great Awakening. He would ask people to share about these types of questions in small group settings each week...
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Have you been finding Scripture to be alive and active? Instead of just being a book, do you feel like Scripture is coming after you?
You are going to have to go to Tim Keller's blog to read the rest of the questions. This is an issue near and dear to me as I think there are few things more important for the American church than to work for the conversion of "Christians." You have to ask questions that will show them who they are, and who they aren't.
This is critical. As someone who got saved after 28 years of church, I can't express how much we must continually preach the gospel to those we "know" aren't saved and those we "know" are.
It even came up at our last community group. We had a scenario where most Christians would have, "Yeah, yeah, yeah"'d through it, but the simple, basic explanation of the gospel broke through into one of their lives for the first time. There was no telling how many years this person held to this very contrary to the gospel belief.
Posted by: Gabe | 03/11/2013 at 03:29 PM