We believe in a blood-washed Africa. What about a blood-washed Europe? Isn't what happens in Africa possible in Europe? The time has come to see that it is!
Europe can become different under the power of the gospel, the major force for change on this earth. Social historians talk arrogantly of the 'post-Christian era', but there is no such thing. The gospel is not dead; it is still here, unchanged and every bit as applicable today as in the past. It is life's true alternative.
For three centuries reason has denied revelation. Now reason is being rubbished by postmodernist teaching about irrationality. But let's not be negative, this presents the gospel with a chance we must not miss. We have always said that human reason is not rational to God. His thoughts transcend human cleverness, making our wisdom look so foolish. So, in a sense, God is postmodern.
Can Europe be washed in the blood of Jesus? A fairly common view is that Africans are a soft touch and Europeans tough nuts. That is nonsense. African culture is hostile to foreign imports, especially the new way of life presented by a revolutionary gospel. For over a hundred years missionaries lived and died in Africa, battling with complex, unyielding problems, and hardly a convert was won. Nor does African history make the continent naturally welcoming to European imports, or what might look like one. The dark continent has produced many Christian martyrs and still does.
Decades ago God planted the vision of a blood-washed Africa in my heart. At the time I was on the staff of a small mission station, sometimes speaking to a gathering of only five or six people. A blood-washed Africa was a wild fantasy not to be entertained by sensible people. But the vision lodged with me night and day and refused to go away. My reaction was hesitant at first, but eventually I made a move. It was as if I, like Moses, had struck the rock in the wilderness; streams began to flow and they are still flowing 30 years later. Like Ezekiel's river, the waters have become a flood, washing the dark stains of centuries of conflict, war and murder from the African soil. The gospel has self-contained resources for human needs, whatever the race or culture.
ONLY BLOOD CAN COVER BLOOD
European soil has to be every bit as bad, if not worse; it is the most blood-soaked on this planet. But only blood can cover blood: 'Bloodshed pollutes the land, and atonement cannot be made for the land '¦ except by the blood of the one who shed it (Numbers 35:33). The Lamb of God shed his blood on behalf of all blood-shedders. He died for them. The waters of the seven oceans of the world could never remove those stains, yet the precious blood of God's Son washes them all away.
God happened to have put me in Africa, so the vision of a blood-washed Africa was particularly relevant to me. But he has put others in Europe. He has no African or indeed any other preferences or prejudices. Africans have neither solicited nor won exclusive compassion or divine patronage. Conditions that are apparently needed for revival certainly did not exist there.
The first Christians overwhelmed Greek, Roman, Jew and Barbarian with the glorious truth of Ephesians 2:4 “ that God loved us 'with his great love' ". His great love is his Son and that is how he loved everybody with his Son, by Jesus, through Jesus, with Jesus. It is still how he loves people today. There is no secondary or subsidiary love. God loves us all, always, with all of himself, for he is love, irrespective of whether we are Europeans or Africans.
Paul wrote to Rome, the world's largest, most intellectual city, entrenched in heathenism, and stated, 'I am so eager to preach the gospel also to you who are at Rome. I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile' (Romans 1:15-16).
What sort of God do European believers believe in? A God omnipotent in Africa and impotent in Europe? The Lord I know has more than once saved a million souls in six days, even on African soil, and can do the same anywhere he likes.
CATCH THE VISION!
The vision of a blood-washed Europe can only become reality when we believe in it and act on it. Do nothing and nothing happens. God does not need to give us inspiring visions to do what we can do, but to show us what he can do and we cannot. We excel at being ordinary, but he has chosen us for the honour of the extraordinary. Catch the vision!
People say, 'I am not the visionary type.' All right, but Joseph, who was a dreamer, did not dream about the Promised Land. He appropriated for himself the word of God to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and 'gave instructions about his bones' so that his mummy should march with them when Israel entered Canaan (Hebrews 11:22).
On one occasion, out on the sea, Peter saw a figure approaching. To test whether it was Jesus, Peter asked him to command him to walk the waves. Asking for the impossible was what identified Jesus.
Events in Africa have been called a 'divine visitation'. Is that New Testament language? Is divine interest just occasional and selective, perhaps even haphazard? Does God have a visiting list to remind him to drop in here or there occasionally, when he has time away from his usual business? No! We are God's business, his priority, to save, heal, and bless, no matter which continent we inhabit. He never leaves us.
Divine visitation does not tally with John 3:16, the text about the God who 'so loved the world'. Ours is not a God who loves some people in some places sometimes and shows it by sending an occasional revival. Africa was not a special stage prepared for a virtuoso performance. God is not a prima donna who only performs on special occasions; he is never absent from the scene. He tells us to pray for harvesters and calls himself the 'Lord of the harvest'. Would he ever just take off, leaving the field that is so important to him?
We cannot argue people out of darkness. All we need to do is switch on the light. Europe has been led into the wilderness, but there is no divine pillar of fire to guide the people. Churches are too often like flight simulators, with no one ever doing any real flying. People there are always learning, but never evangelising. And those who go there looking for the guiding light are offered bookish theories instead. An evangelist friend told me that a pastor even abandoned him in the middle of a gospel campaign to go to a conference on evangelism!
Jesus came to seek and save what has been lost. We Europeans definitely qualify! If ever there was a right moment to embrace expectations of Jesus at work in Europe, it is now. The time has come to talk of a blood-washed Europe. The time has come to think big, not just to sit back after cutting our own little lawns. We are the only world-changers there are. Fashions have their seasons, but the gospel alone can re-shape history.
Our cities may seem like those in Canaan, surrounded by walls that reach up to heaven walled in by unbelief. But, let's not forget it, the walls of Jericho fell. The walls of unbelief in Europe are beginning to crumble. What is long overdue is the shout of the people of God. Not long ago Communism, a modern Jericho, seemed an impregnable fortress threatening Christian advance, but 75 years later it suddenly collapsed.
THE TIDE IS COMING
I grew up near the mouth of the river Elbe in northern Germany and I often used to see huge flat-bottom river barges set fast in the mud banks. No tug or marine engine could shift them. But the tide quietly rippled in, hardly perceptible, creeping higher and higher up the sides of those immovable hulks. Soon those hundreds of tons were floating. From the quayside I could move them with the slightest kick.
When we obey the Holy Spirit the water begins to rise. That is fact, not wishful thinking. We are seeing promises fulfilled which once sounded like fantasy. The words of Joel 2:28 are coming true: 'I will pour out my Spirit on all people.' In 1904 a couple of dozen black people and some white sat around on nail kegs in a half burnt-out carpenter's shop in a Los Angeles backwater, believing Joel 2:28 and speaking in tongues. People thought they were a joke! Some joke! Statistics for 2000 reveal that there are 524 million Pentecostal-charismatic Christians, more than one in ten of the adult population of the entire globe.
If two dozen could become 524 million in less than a century, what could the 524 million become? Now is the time to work and not abandon hope.
Let's take a closer look at Scripture. God made a dramatic statement in Jerusalem as Christ died. By his mighty hand he ripped the thirty-foot-long, heavy, embroidered curtain of the Holy of Holies into two pieces, from top to bottom, declaring open access to God. What is more, it signified that the God of the Temple was out and about as the God of the whole earth, not to be associated with one earthly spot, not even Jerusalem. 'You will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem,' Jesus said (John 4:21); he would be wherever we are in indiscriminate faithfulness. 'If anyone loves me ¦ my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him' (John 14:23).
At the Jewish feast of Pentecost in Jerusalem, the first disciples, all Jews, received the gift of the Holy Spirit. A few years later one of them, Peter, preached to non-Jewish Europeans in Gentile Caesarea. Everyone was baptised in the Holy Spirit. Back in Jerusalem he declared, 'God gave them [the Gentiles] the same gift as he gave us, the gift of the Spirit, for God does not show favouritism but accepts men from every nation who fear him and do what is right' (Acts 11:17; 10:34-35). Europeans in a distant Gentile city, but the same gift from the same God. God had done it again but with a difference. And it was different again in Samaria.
God does not just copy what he did in the past. The 1904 Welsh Revival and the American Great Awakening that took place 250 years ago were different from revival in Samaria. We are told that 'there was great joy in that city' (Acts 8:8) and there is joy now in Africa. God does not work in monochrome. The past must not hold the present hostage.
THE EARTH WILL BE FILLED WITH THE GLORY OF THE LORD
Will there be world revival before Jesus comes? I am not waiting for that. I am called to evangelise and not to speculate. The promise of God in Habakkuk 2:14 is good enough for me 'the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea'. The waters cover the floor of the ocean and there is no dry spot there. No intellectual and no devil can prevent that. Unbelief, European postmodernism and humanist philosophy are merely a writhing serpent, twisting this way and that, constantly changing its form. Yet one thing is sure: God will break its neck.
Confused and misled, Western nations are waiting for strong Christians to lead them back to the living fountain of water. Unfortunately, we can miss out, distracted by mundane interests. On the Day of Pentecost 120 disciples met together in Jerusalem. Paul said that some 500 men had seen the resurrected Jesus; so 380 were busy and missed the greatest meeting of all history. The 120 took Christ's words seriously and did 'wait in Jerusalem'.
In our 1988 Nairobi campaign Mrs Teresia Wairimu heard me preach. Devoured with longing for God, she waited six years for a CfaN Fire Conference, praying to be baptised in the Holy Spirit. Finally hearing that I was in Norway, she waited no longer; Teresia boarded a plane and arrived in our gospel meeting. When I invited people forward, she was the first off the mark, running forward. The power of God pushed her to the ground. Back in Nairobi she held a meeting in her house with 17 people. It grew by tens, then hundreds, thousands, and then ten thousands. The other week she presented me, as her visiting evangelist, with a congregation of hundreds of thousands.
Life is about change. The tides change and can lift Europe off the mud banks just like those barges in my childhood home. 'With God all things are possible' (Matthew 19:26).