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Obstacle 2: Reason Has Its Limits

The second potential obstacle to personal and national spiritual revival is as basic as our desire to know God. It is the need to understand. North Americans are influenced strongly by the Greek, rationalistic tradition that essentially says, the most effective way of knowing something or someone is through the mind. The mind is the avenue of knowledge, the mechanism on which we depend to know ourselves, others, our world, and our God.

This rationalistic heritage is so embedded in who we are that we often make our analytical thinking processes synonymous with belief. Thus our faith tends to follow a logical, rational path. Simply put, our flawed rationalistic minds cannot fully comprehend revival. Revival is not a mystery to be “thought through.”

Revival is a movement of the Spirit to be experienced with reverence, checked against the clear guidelines of Scripture, and then given to the God who alone deserves our praise. If we want to know this God, particularly in a season of awakening, we need to remember Jesus’ words: “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:24 ESV).

How can we know the Spirit with organized, yet limited rationalistic minds? How can we use our minds to the fullest to understand revival, without limiting our understanding of God to what our minds can process? As you come to God through your own prayer, confession, and repentance, do not come to him with the Greek mindset that compartmentalizes life into body, soul, and spirit. Come to God with the mindset of the Hebrew, as a whole person made complete in God.

The Hebrew mindset did not compartmentalize body, mind, and soul. None of the three was any more or less important than the other two. All three comprised the one person. Our emotion, a vital part of one’s soul to the Hebrew (distinct from emotionalism, which can be manufactured), would be as vital a part of your make-up as your mind. A personal Jesus-Now revival occurs when we allow God to have preeminence through the mind (knowledge), the body (obedience), and the soul (confession).