In our prayers for reformation and revival over the years, we have asked God to move in remarkable ways, and He has been pleased to grant many aspects of our requests. But as God has done wonderful things in our midst, He has been pleased to do it over time, over the course of years. And again, we are enormously grateful.
But if we study previous periods of revival and subsequent declension, we can see a feature at work there that we must also take account of. A good example of this would be the periods of revival during Jonathan Edwards’ ministry there. The problem is the problem of time, generations, and young people. God does a remarkable thing, and those who experience it know the significance of what God has done. But that old conveyor belt of time is constantly moving, and cannot be slowed down for anything, and the young people growing up in the aftermath of this work are easily disposed to take it all for granted, or to ignore what has happened, or to assume that they can just coast on the strength of what has happened, and get really serious about Jesus later on.
And so this exhortation is directed at the young people in our midst, those in high school and college. Do not mistake how God reckons these things. The place which you occupy means that more is expected of you, not less. The place you occupy means that double the labor will get the same results, and so contributing just half the labor means the results will be a spiritual disaster. The place you occupy means that you all need to learn a lot more about how we got here than you currently know.
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