There’s really nothing like grace!

Grace explained the revival I was a part of, the Jesus Movement of the 60s and 70s.

It was the spiritual air we breathed.

Recently I spent a weekend in a church in Pennsylvania talking about grace in every forum they give me: book signing at the local book store, Campus Crusade for Christ “cru” meeting at the university, a group of young men from the church, a men’s retreat, and finally at the worship service of the church.

My message?

Grace, grace, grace, grace, grace.

Grace explained our revival. We were thirsty for it, and those who embraced us and discipled us gave it to us.

Grace explains Christianity. Paul told us not to be ashamed of it (Romans 1:6-7).

Grace saves us from ourselves. Under grace we’re not who we used to be, and we don’t have to live the way we used to live (Romans 6:14).

Grace is what the world needs.

Not our theories, our works, our hidden and driven little religious communities.

The world needs grace.

Let’s start giving it to them.

Grace is free to us because it cost God everything.

It Really Happened!

I love watching new Christians on their first real Easter. Everything is new to them and they just can’t get over it. “Jesus died for me, was buried, and rose again. It really happened, and it was all because He loved me.”

They arrive on Easter morning having thought about eternal life daily since their new birth. They remind me of my first year in Christ when I heard about Christ on the streets during the Jesus Movement of the 60s and 70s. It was all we talked about-Jesus, His love, His death, His resurrection, our new life, hope, meaning, and destiny.

And then we figured it out that Easter was now about something more than egg hunts and spring break. It was the church’s official celebration of the resurrection event.

“Wow, what a concept,” I remember thinking. “We should go to church too,” referring to my Jesus Movement friends.

Let’s Go to Church!

So we did.

But we weren’t too impressed.

It was obvious that they didn’t want a bunch of ragamuffins like us in their pews. We didn’t dress right, didn’t know the songs, didn’t know when to stand up or sit down, and took some of their every-Sunday seats.

It was also pretty obvious that they weren’t as excited about Easter as we were. Oh they seemed to enjoy singing the songs we later found out they traditionally sang every Easter. They surely loved getting all dressed up in their Easter-Sunday finest. And they talked a lot to each other about their ham dinner and other family traditions as they ignored us.

But the wonder of it all and the magnitude of the privilege of belonging to the One who died and rose again, seemed secondary to all the religious trappings.

Desperate for the Resurrection!

I don’t know all the reasons for the contrast between our appreciation of Easter and theirs, but some of it had to be the desperation factor. For them, it was just another Easter; for us, it was a celebration of the Event that rescued us from our desperate lives. It wasn’t that we were any more desperate than they were, we were just more aware of it.

In his classic on the life of Christ, The Training of the Twelve, A. B. Bruce writes of the two disciples who met the resurrected Jesus on the road to Emmaus, “Their hearts were set a-burning when they had become very dry and withered: hopeless, sick, and life-weary through sorrow and disappointment. It is always so; the fuel must be dry that the spark may take hold. The truth is, the heart needs to be dried by trial before it can be made to burn.”

Easter is for those who get it that every experience of life apart from Christ is dried and withered. Easter is for those who admit that we would be hopeless, sick, and life weary apart from His mercy. Easter is for those desperate for resurrection power.

Are you?

“And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.” -Paul, 1 Corinthians 15:17

The television celebrity impressed me deeply. I couldn’t help thinking that if he and I had grown up together or had served together in the military, we would have been good friends. I liked him in spite of all the rumors about his lifestyle. He joked about being a “backslidden” worshiper from his childhood church. God had cycled our lives together for one fascinating afternoon when he introduced me to his media world and I talked with him about the history of Church of the Open Door.

Just before our day ended he looked off and asked of no one in particular, “When did the church become so mean?”

I said, “We’re not mean, why don’t you come here and give us a chance?”

He laughed uncomfortably, and said, “I might just come and visit you some Sunday, Ed.”

I prayed for him and we shook hands. As I watched him drive away with his cameraman, his question haunted me.

On the drive home that night I turned my radio dial to Christian talk radio. Appalled by the snarling arrogance of the host, I prayed that the man I had met that day wasn’t listening. Whether he knew it or not, his “we’ll show those sinners when this bill gets passed” and “just wait until God deals with these idiots” sent a message to those outside of God’s grace: God’s on our side and He hates you.

The Bible teaches that God is on the side of the righteous and emphasizes that ultimately our side will win. But our victory will not come through favorable voting returns but at the return of Jesus Christ to rule and reign on earth.

What the Bible does not teach is that God hates sinners. The New Testament says that the message of the church is the Good News of reconciliation “who has reconciled us to himself through Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.” (2 Corinthians 5:18)

If God hated sinners—those unreconciled to Him—this verse tells us He would have to start with us. Instead, He loves sinners and sent His Son to die in order to reconcile sinners like us. To us, the reconciled sinners, He has given this ministry of reconciliation, “that is, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and his commit to us the world of reconciliation.” (2 Corinthians 5:19)

So how would your non-Christian friends and acquaintances classify you? Do your life and words scream condemnation or do they whisper reconciliation?

This is an excerpt from my book, Reborn to Be Wild: Reviving Our Radical Pursuit of Jesus! It’s all about the Jesus Movement and the lessons we learned.

David C. Cook Publishers

We Lived It

Do you remember the Jesus Movement? If you do and you were actually a part of it, you know what revival looks like from the inside. Ours was a spiritual revolution that happened on the streets. It was exciting; we had a front row seat to the raw power of God.

But It’s Not About Then

My book, Reborn to Be Wild isn’t just about our memories of the past, but every Christian’s mandate for the future. Jesus hasn’t changed His orders to His church: Make disciples!

So before you get all “oh yeah, that was great, remember the songs we use to sing” on me, let me ask you how it’s been going since then. Here are five questions that should give you some idea of how our life looks from Jesus’ perspective:

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Life on earth was a hopeless cycle of misery and pain.

Men and women were helpless to do anything about it.

Then, something happened.

God broke through the pain and misery by sending His Son, Jesus Christ.

Jesus called it “mercy.”

And when someone calls out to Him crying, “Have mercy on me,” He always does.

That cry for help characterized the Jesus Movement. We knew we needed mercy.

Every parable illustrating mercy in the New Testament occurs when Jesus is talking to self-righteous people. His message is consistent: Your confidence that you don’t need Me is your undoing. It’s the whores and tax-collectors who know they need Me who receive God’s mercy.

Maybe that’s why they called us “Jesus Freaks.”

Question: Do you remember the day God’s mercy broke through the pain and misery of your life?

Remembering The Jesus Movement

A few years ago I wrote a book, Reborn to Be Wild. It was all about the Jesus Movement revival of the 60s and 70s.

I’m a Jesus Movement convert, and in the middle six chapters of the book I answered the question,“Why did the Jesus Movement quit moving?” from my perspective.

A Lie We Believed

One of the lies we believed that domesticated us to the point of irrelevance was: Grace and freedom are dangerous.

Really? Then why did Paul write his most scathing letter to the Galatians? Read it for yourself. If you’re not already anesthetized by the institutional church, it will awaken your wild heart in Christ.

One of my favorite sentences from the book captures the truth of Galatians:

Grace isn’t optional; it’s necessary. Freedom isn’t dangerous; it’s glorious!

Question: Are you afraid of grace and freedom?

Why?

I promise you that if you risk trusting the truth of Galatians, it will unleash your Christian life.

In the first three chapters of my book, Reborn to Be Wild, I tell my story as a 60s radical who met Jesus during this great movement of the Holy Spirit. Every time I read these chapters, the stunning reality of the deep darkness I came out of stirs my heart.

When His enemies came after Him in the garden on the night He was betrayed, Jesus said, “But this is your hour, and the power of darkness” (Luke 22:53).

That describes life without Christ. Every hour blackened by that same desperate darkness–the darkness dominating Christ’s enemies. That was me…that was you.

I’m overwhelmed by the grace of God and Jesus’ love that rescued me from the power of darkness and translated me into the kingdom of the Son of God’s love (Colossians 1:13).

Are you?

If you want to fall on your knees in thanksgiving, spend a few hours writing down what the darkness of your life was like before His love ran you down!

Question: Do you remember the darkness?

This is an excerpt from my book about the Jesus Movement, Reborn to Be Wild:

I had been attending Fruitvale Community Church for just a few months when it happened—my first over-the-top worship experience. Since I knew nothing about Jesus before I believed in Him, Ted’s sermons unfolded the wonder of new life in Christ every Sunday. But this particular Sunday was special.

Ted taught on the rapture—that future event when every living Christian would meet Christ in the air. I remember thinking, You’ve got to be kidding me! This just gets better and better. Jesus is the only way to heaven. He loves me. He died for me. He gave me new life. And now you’re telling me that He’s coming from heaven to get me?

And then Ted’s wife, Jo, sat at the piano and started to sing.

The market place is empty,

No more traffic in the streets.

All the builder tools are silent,

No more time to harvest wheat.

Busy housewives cease their labors,

In the courtroom no debate.

Work on earth is all suspended

As the King comes through the gate.

I could see it in my mind’s eye. Suddenly nothing mattered because Jesus just showed up. I remember thinking Jo sounded like an angel when she sang the chorus:

Oh the King is coming,

The King is coming.

I just heard the trumpet sounding

And now His face I see.

Oh, the King is coming,

The King is coming

PRAISE GOD,

He’s coming for me!

This was all too wonderful to take in cognitively—I could only stand and sing and cry. Not only is Jesus the only way. Not only is Jesus the King. Not only is He coming back to make things right. He’s coming back for me. Jesus was coming back for me, and I needed to get to work for Him.

I don’t think it’s an accident that our revival occurred during a time when the church and the world seemed preoccupied with biblical prophecy. Everyone, Christian and non-Christian seemed to be asking questions about the return of the Lord. Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth was the largest selling nonfiction book of the 1970s, and we virtually memorized it. Citywide prophecy conferences sprouted up in every major metropolitan center. Little Israel was back in the Promised Land, and the only explanation for her amazing victories in the Six-Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973-74 that made sense was the prophecies of Daniel, Isaiah, and Ezekiel.

You may believe that prophecy is irrelevant today and feel that the church should be about the more immediate needs of humanity, but it seems reasonable to ask if there is any connection between prophetic teaching and revival.

It’s impossible to separate the explosive growth of the church in Acts from its prophetic hope. The early Christians who turned the world upside down for Christ hoped in Jesus’ coming. And so has every revival generation since. I know ours did.

Question: Do you have a Jesus Movement memory of when you first believed your King is coming?

60s

I met Jesus during a revival–the Jesus Movement of the 60s and 70s. We didn’t know we were part of a revival. I suppose the ones His grace reaches in a revival never do.

All I know is that the love of Christ ran me down and overwhelmed me so that I had to tell others about my Savior. And I wasn’t alone, there were thousands of us.

You would think that the institutional church would have embraced us. They didn’t, and here’s part of the reason why–we were talking about something that went beyond mere moralism.

Being Good for Jesus

Most of the church people who resisted us had grown up listening to shaming sermons about being good for Jesus. Their God was for moral people and against sinners. They were caught up in a system that told them they were one of the good people, the moral people. If they gave money to the church, attended regularly, and managed their sin better than ordinary people, they were “good.”

But we came proclaiming a radical message of grace. We had no illusions about our goodness apart from the One who washed us from our sins in His own blood. Our lives pulled them toward the power to break the chains the of moralistic religiosity that enslaved them. Most stepped back from that threshold, and returned to their placid pews.

That’s just the way revival is. It doesn’t wait for those who must have all their theological loose ends tied up, who think that the grace of God is for other, “bad” people.

So if a revival hit the streets today, would you see it and embrace it? Or would you miss it and talk about its participants in self-assured sentences that expose the emptiness of your soul?

One of my most earnest prayers is that the Lord would not let me settle for less than all that He wants to give me by His grace. It’s the best way I know to guard my heart against the grace-killer of religious moralism.

Question: How about you? Do you fear settling as much as I do?

Jesus and Self-Control

When I first met the real Jesus in the 60s revival–the Jesus Movement–I was impressed with His self-control.

I’m not talking about His ability to somehow throttle His emotions while walking on earth the way the fundies picture Him, all buttoned-down and loafered-up with no excesses.

I’m talking about God controlling Himself in the way Jesus did when Satan tempted Him in the wilderness or when His enemies asked Him for a big rocket across the sky miracle.

If I were God, I’d show those people what for.

I’d turn the whole mountain to bread and then throw it into some lake that I had turned into a bowl of chicken noodle soup. “Okay, Satan, my man, how about that?!”

“Okay you dirty little Galileans. All these miracles you’ve already seen aren’t  enough to convince you? Then how about some fire and brimstone to heat this argument up a little. What do you think of me now?”

That’s what I would of done!

But of course I’m not Jesus. I’m not God in the flesh. I’m not the Friend of Sinners who never gives people what they deserve. He just loves them and lays down His life for them.

Come to think of it, I’m pretty okay with Jesus’ self-control. If He gave me what I deserved, I’d be sunk!

I think there must be a connection between His love for me and His self-control somewhere, but I’m going to leave that to better theologians than I.

I think I’ll just receive His love, jump up and down, and shout about His grace and mercy.

Question: In what specific way are you thankful that Jesus’ love for you and His self-control are connected?