For the past five years, I’ve attended the Willow Creek Leadership Summit.  It’s a two-day conference for leaders attended by 120,000 leaders around the world and is broadcast live from Willow Creek’s campus – via satellite – to 140 cities all across North America in August each year.  Then, after the summit concludes each year, it’s translated into dozens of languages and sent – via DVD – to 55 countries around the world.  It’s quite an incredible event.

Last Thursday and Friday, I took Jesse and Peter (the guys on staff at my church) and attended the Summit at the Albuquerque satellite location.  We were inspired, challenged, and encouraged in our leadership by leaders like Bill Hybels (founder and pastor of Willow Creek), David Gergen (CNN’s senior political analyst), Bono (lead singer of U2 and humanitarian), Tony Blair (former Prime Minister of England), Wess Stafford (President and CEO of Compassion International) and others.

One of the sessions was lead by Tim Keller, the Founder and Senior Pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, NY, which has been named one of the Top 25 Most Influential Churches in America as it not only ministers to 6,000 New Yorkers every week but also has planted more than 100 churches as well.  Tim is in his 60′s but his congregation is made up mostly of 25-40 year olds, many of whom were once very skeptical of the Christian faith.

In his session, he addressed the epidemic of spiritual deadness in American churches, gave the symptoms of it, and offered a couple of prescriptions for it.  This was all based on his study and preaching on the parable of the prodigal son found in the Gospels and spelled out in his book, The Prodigal God.  Since this epidemic exists in so many churches, I thought I would share some of his insights with you.

How to tell if you’ve fallen prey to spiritual deadness:

1. You express strong and lasting anger when things go wrong. Anger is a natural response to pain and injustice, but if you stay angry and refuse to let things go, you’re well on your way to spiritual deadness.

2. You viciously counter-attack others or you experience devastation when you’re criticized. This shows that you’re not trusting the Lord to sort things out and deal with the one who has offended you.

3. Your prayers are petitionary only. There’s no intimacy and enjoyment of God. A person who is spiritually dead – if he does pray – only asks things of God and doesn’t worship and enjoy Him.

4. You’re constantly loathing people. Because you’re not content in the Lord and enjoying His provisions for you, you are constantly looking at others with envy, coveteousness, and loathing.

5. You can’t forgive others. A spiritually dead person is completely out of touch with how much he’s been forgiven by the Lord, and so he feels superior to others and is unable to forgive others.

If you recognize that you may be spirutally dead, here are some things you must do:

1. You must experience a new level of repentance. This is not just an acknowledgment of your wrong-doing, but it’s engaging in the act of making an all-out effort to turn from the wrong-doing.  It involves doing whatever it takes to leave the sinful behavior or attitude behind in order to run the opposite way toward the Lord.

2. You must experience a new level of rejoicing. This is what the prodigal son experienced.  He returned to His Father and finally understood what it cost to bring him back into the home.  Half of the estate was gone.  Therefore, the robe and the ring that the Father gave him actually belonged to the elder brother.  This is why the elder brother was so upset about the party and the gift-giving.  The money to finance all of this came from his half of the estate!

The lesson for us is this: A Father needs the resources of an elder brother in order to bring a wayward son back. The prodigal son’s elder brother was resistant to using his resources to bring his younger brother back, but in Christ, we have a loving elder brother!   We have a robe because Jesus hung naked on the cross. We have a festival cup because Jesus drank the cup of judgment and wrath.  Jesus was willing to give up a portion of His inheritance in order to welcome us (the prodigals) back into the Father’s Kingdom!  And in this, we can (and must) experience a new level of rejoicing!