ROMANS 5:1-5: Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance,4and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”

Before we go into today’s nugget, here is an assignment for us today after our reading. The next time you are in a group of Christians and conversations, observe, not judge, two things; the amount of joy you see in their faces and in their dialogues how much Christ is talked about in words of fresh spiritual encounters of His Person, not what is being done for Him or what He is doing for them.

I think this excerpt from D. A. Carson’s book A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Praying with Paul is a good summary of much of what we will observe about modern Christianity–“When it comes to knowing God, many of us constitute a culture of the spiritually stunted. So much of our religion is packaged to address our felt needs—and these are almost uniformly anchored in our pursuit of happiness and fulfillment, without rightly understanding where true happiness and fulfillment lie. God becomes the Great Being who, potentially at least, meets our needs and fulfills our aspirations. We think too little of what he is like, of his wisdom, knowledge, power, love, transcendence, mystery, and glory. We are not intoxicated by his holiness and his love; his thoughts and words capture too little of our imagination, too little of our discourse, too few of our priorities. Many of our religious exercises and verbal expressions feel painfully unreal, inauthentic, merely formulaic.”

When it comes to the impact of the Gospel in our lives, it is not designed to produce Christians who look like they just “sucked on a lemon” and appear sour. Nor is the good news of what God has done in today’s scripture–pouring His love poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit–to lead us to being restless, anxious, worldly, stressed-out and joyless Christians who are more consumed with self-love than Christ’s love.

We are people in need of revival if our joy is low and Christ’s love is not producing self-denying servants of His who are enamored with Him and place no limits on the sacrifices in serving Him. Revived Christians become servants abounding with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23). And that isn’t being a “super Christian” but is the actual definition of what normal Christianity is to be in and from God’s people.

So, as we do our assignment and observe other Christians to validate the state of the church in need of revival, start by observing the presence or absence of Christ’s joy and love in the person we see in the mirror each morning. And then let that personal observation and those of other Christians drive us to pray for one another to encounter Christ afresh and be revived.

PRAYER: “Father, I seem to know a lot about Your love and can talk about it, but I need to desperately experience it.”

QUOTE: “A clear sign of spiritual indifference is to live day to day having no hunger or pursuit of experiencing God’s love.”