Looking Toward Revival

Judges 20 LOOKING TOWARD REVIVAL

Give background from Judges 19

Sounds similar to America today. Last year, President Bush signed a ban, making it illegal to perform partial-birth abortions. The ban has not been enforced during the past year because 3 federal judges agreed to hear constitutional challenges to the ban.

On Sept. 8, U.S. District judge Richard Koph declared the ban unconstitutional, saying it interferes with a woman’s right to an abortion and fails to allow exceptions when a woman’s health is in danger.

The problem is, our founding fathers would never have imagined such a thing-taking place. Doctors say there is no medical reason for such a procedure to take place. Rather than protecting a mother’s health, the procedure, where a child is delivered breech, all but its head, and then has its brains removed before delivery, actually endangers a mother’s health. Oh, how things have changed.

The citizens of Louisiana passed a constitutional amendment protecting traditional marriage and identifying it as the union of 1 man and 1 woman. Louisiana State judge William Morvant has overturned that amendment. Do you honestly believe, our founding fathers would ever have approved of homosexual marriage? I remember as a child hearing on the radio where a local government was striving to make it illegal for unmarried heterosexuals to live together.

Things have certainly changed.

How are we, followers of the Lord Jesus Christ, to respond to such things?

- Read Judges 20:1-28

I. THE PEOPLE’S CONCERN - 19:30, 20:8

Nothing like this has ever happened before. We’re going to do something about it.

Oh my friend, we must be concerned. We must be upset. When we see children being abused & exposed to ungodly things. When we read, that a Supreme Court Justice said, speaking at a university, that he is in favor of orgies because they release social tensions, we must get upset.

When we read that the majority of Americans, due to sonograms, now believe that unborn babies are truly humans & alive and yet over 35% still support abortions, we must get upset. …

II. THE PEOPLE’S RESPONSE – 20:18

They went to God with their concern. …

III. THE PEOPLE’S MISTAKE – 20:23

They went to God because:

1. They were upset by the condition of their land

2. They went to the Lord crying because their people were being hurt,

But:

They went to the Lord without self-examination. – v26

We have never seen anything in Israel like this before, but, ignore our sins.

2 Chronicles 7:14 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 I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.

Sunday I felt powerless preaching. Today, I met with a man who asked what we would have to do to see revival in our church? Oh my friends, we must take a stand for what is right. We must take a stand against sin and evil in our society, but revival will not come until the people of God get right with God. We point fingers at the abortionist, and the homosexual, and the pornographer, and ignore our own sins.

1. We make sports our idols, and athletes our gods.

2. Must we have bigger TVs, & newer computers when missionaries need support?

3. Gluttony, lust,