Awaken!

What is an awakening?
"An act or moment of becoming suddenly aware of something." 
"To spring into being."

Is there such a thing as a Jesus Awakening?
Where people who are not in God's family are awakened to Jesus? Where they spring into Jesus' family only through faith in Jesus Christ?

Jonathan Edwards wrestled with his own conversion. He was trained at Yale as a theologian and became a pastor. As he got to know the older teens and young twenties of his day he discovered, due to their circumstances and culture, that they could not marry as quickly as they wanted. This resulted in idleness, gossiping and sexual sins. Edwards focused his preaching on this. After many years of resistance, suddenly some teens and twenty-somethings professed faith in Jesus, declared they had been converted and desired to join the church.  Edwards shared about this with other churches and other churches had similar experiences of new people coming to faith in Jesus. These were the seeds of the Great Awakening.

• How can we be part of a Jesus Awakening?
• How can we prepare ourselves, our church leadership, our church ministries for a Jesus awakening?
• How can we prepare those who need awakening to be awakened?

Peter replied, “Each of you must repent of your sins and turn to God, and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. Then you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. This promise is to you, and to your children, and even to the Gentiles—all who have been called by the Lord our God.” Then Peter continued preaching for a long time, strongly urging all his listeners, “Save yourselves from this crooked generation!”

Those who believed what Peter said were baptized and added to the church that day—about 3,000 in all. Acts 2:38-41 (NLT) 
 
May Jesus do this again in our Fab 5, the 1,000 homes around Southtown, and whomever Jesus reaches through our social media.
 
Praying for a Jesus awakening.
 
Pastor Chris

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