Columbine, Aurora, and Newtown, places of horrific tragedy. The murderous acts in these communities proved so painful that, as a nation, we staggered when the news broke. Just when we think we have seen the worst, a more horrible event occurs, throwing us into a country-wide state of shock. But another thing begins to happen, almost as bad. We start to grow numb, suffering a kind of “anesthesia of the soul.”
Researcher Robert Lifton described this anesthesia as “psychic numbing.” He writes: “In a situation in which our emotional feelings are overwhelmingly painful or unpleasant we have the capacity to anesthetize ourselves . . . we simply tune it out. Our capacity for horror becomes blunted.”
In the larger Church, such numbness has caused a “loss of voice.” John Dawson writes in, Healing America’s Wounds, “This is a land of refuge, outreach and example; however the American Church has lost its voice, and this is in part because we do not know what to say.”
What will it take for us to find our voice again, to realize that the Church really does have the final answer to the kinds of evil and pain we see in places like Newtown? We believe Jesus grieves the overall decline in the moral power, influence and impact churches today should have in their communities, not just the tragedies themselves.
The story of a similar tragedy is told in the Old Testament, one so disturbing that it motivated godly people to shake off the numbness and callousness of their souls, cleanse their hearts and reclaim their culture. In Judges 19-20, a Levite takes a concubine for himself. But the unfaithful concubine prostitutes herself and flees to her father’s house in fear. The Levite tracks her down, reconciles with her, and they travel to Gibeah. Shortly after their arrival the men of the town seize her and, as Judges19:25 sadly reports, “the men of the town raped her and abused her all night until morning and let her go at the approach of dawn.” She crawled home and died on the doorstep of her home.
The offense was so heinous, and the method used by the Levite to awaken a sense of righteousness so extreme that it broke through the spiritual anesthesia dulling God’s people. Judges 19:29-30 reveals, “When he entered his house he took a knife and laid hold of his concubine and cut her into twelve pieces, limb by limb and sent her throughout the territory of Israel. And it came about that all who saw it said, ‘Nothing like his has ever happened or been seen from the day when the sons of Israel came up from the land of Egypt to this day. Consider it, take counsel and speak up!’”
Do you find the Levite’s actions shocking? God’s people of that era found them so. How bad do things have to get in our culture before we similarly wake up? What of a similar nature would shock us out of our numbness? As the weeks pass and Newtown fades in our memories–as did Columbine, 9/11, Katrina, and other similar national tragedies–it becomes apparent that these things have failed to motivate numbed American churches to humble themselves, pray, seek His face and turn from their wicked ways.
With the pattern of increasingly painful events in our nation, Christ grieves over each new tragedy and also grieves over His churches as they sleep the sleep of Sardis, not realizing that He has created them to be the instruments to heal our land.
Mark Barnard serves as President of Blessing Point Ministries and is the author of The Path of Revival – Restoring Our Nation One Church at a Time and co-author of the Healing the Heart of Your Church Facilitator Guide. Like us on Facebook.
Article adapted from Chapter One, The Path of Revival – Restoring Our Nation One Church at a Time (ChurchSmart 2009), by Mark Barnard.
Ever since moving to Senoia June 2018, one of my prayers became, “Awake, o sleepers, and rise from the dead, arise from your lackadaisical slumber, and return to your Maker, awake, awake, return to the Word of God, to worship, to prayer….” And more prayers added to it later….”come out of the whitewashed tombs of sin and pride…awake…”