I have preached on the Lazarus Generation for at least twenty-five years. And I was wrong. I was given the mantle of this by the preacher who first heard it from the Spirit and coined the phrase. He and I were both wrong.
If you were to gauge exactly who this generation is and how to “win” them through the current efforts of the church, more than likely you would start some sort of hipster ministry. For instance, you could take out all titles and replace them with something more hip: Pastor would be out and in its place would be “Pathfinder” or even just “Dude”.
Or you could place religious symbols from as many faiths as you could around your “community space” and then use bean bags and couches to fill empty areas. Oh, and don’t forget your incense and your U2charist… the kids like those; they make them feel spiritual and stuff.
Now, that is exactly the way that many people are going about ministry to this generation. Granted, most of that stupidity is being done by ex-youth group leaders who are now all grown up and keeping the church cool. I have to tell you though, had you tried to win me with any of that I may have tested your faith a bit.
You see, I come from a different group than you’re probably used to. We will be called the Lazarus Generation. We will be called that because we are dead generations that Christ is raising from the grave.
Big deal, you say, I was dead as well, we all were when we were unawakened. Yeah, that may be technically true but in comparison to the Lazarus kind of dead most people were just “mostly dead” if I can quote Miracle Max from The Princess Bride.
The Lazarus Generation was “all dead” which generally is regarded as a hopeless case scenario where the only remaining option is going through their pockets for spare change. There’s dead and there’s dead-dead.
You have to wonder why the enemy went after Lazarus in the Word, don’t you? I mean, he wasn’t an apostle or prophet or pastor. He had not shown himself to be of any consequence whatsoever when the enemy killed him off. Killing him only had one visible consequence: causing grief to Mary, Martha, and Jesus. In the end, I believe that this was his intention from the start. He knew that he couldn’t hurt the Lord but he could certainly hurt those that he loved.
Today’s Lazarus Generation were also those that the enemy had specifically targeted to destroy because of who loved them. Most of those considered to be a part of the Lazarus Generation came from the homes of believers before they fell away. Somewhere between the empty religion, the hypocrisy, and the system of politics in the church world, Lazarus had had enough and decided that the faith they grew up with was a fairy tale, like Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and a winning baseball team in Pittsburgh.
And when they left, they left hard.
Lazarus tried Satanism, eastern religion, Nordic mythology, atheism, and pretty much anything else so long as it was not the religion that they grew up with. They never really doubted that God existed; they just doubted what everyone was saying about him. And they sinned in every way imaginable, hurt everyone around them, and burnt bridges like it was going out of style. And somewhere, someone cried for them.
My mother used to tell me that the “houndsof heaven” were going to get me. I had no idea what that was but it was a bit freaky. Of course, she meant that the “hounds” were goodness and mercy and that they would follow me all the days of my life. And she was right of course because one day during a suicide attempt those hounds finally caught up to me. And I am so glad that they did.
And so Lazarus got saved.
I have been preaching this for a very long time and until very recently, I believed that our salvation was Christ raising us from the dead like Lazarus, bound head to toe in grave clothes. I waited and prayed and fasted to see my generation awakened. Then, I allowed stress, finances, and my skewed ambition to lead me to booze.
Just a six-pack a night of craft beer led to fifteen years of absolute misery I lost my marriage, my kids, my belongings, everything. After trying desperately to build my house in the storm, I finally decided that God and myself no longer got along. Then I died for real.
That’s where I stayed for five years, drunk from morning til I passed out. Every single day. No God, no Spirit, no revelation, nothing. The presence that I loved for decades, now I no longer felt.
For two years now, I’ve been sober. Drifting, uncertain, struggling with mental illness, but sober. I held no hope of ministry, I was disqualified and evil, in my mind. Let God keep blessing the Joel Osteens of the world, I quit.
And then in the last few weeks I realized that Lazarus was a believer before hedied. It couldn’t align with his salvation, which had occurred before he died. The story of Lazarus is not one of salvation, rather, it’s a story about dealing with the failure of Christ to rescue you from the sicknesses that were killing you.
There’s a Greek word that is associated with Christ, skandalon. He is a rock of offense and a stone that makes men fall. Occasionally, the skandalon crushes you. Like John the Baptist in prison, we lose hope that He will come to our rescue. All of our projections of who we think He is fall away and we are alone. And remember what Christ said when He heard John’s doubts, “Blessed is he that is not offended in me”. I wasn’t one of the blessed, I was bitter and very, very angry.
Not to mention that just like the biblical Lazarus, most don’t want to see us raised from the dead either. “But Lord, by this time, he stinks” can pretty much summarize my life now, and possibly yours. They knew that Lazarus was coming back with baggage and questions that would make them very uncomfortable and as cool as seeing him raised would be, they weren’t entirely sure that they wanted him back. I mean, they were arguing against it.
I think in part this has to do with the fact that getting yourself raised from the dead changes your perspective a bit. The Japanese used to talk about the state of euphoria that came with coming back from the brink of death. If someone intervened when they were about to commit seppuku, they described the feeling as being transcendent. Colors were brighter, the air was crisper all around them, and every movement had a delicate beauty that had previously gone unnoticed to them. Life had not been lived up until that point and there could never be any going back.
How much more would this be the case after having been “all dead”? What would your perspective be like after landing on the other side and experiencing the total hopelessness of death? And then, suddenly in the dark, when all hope that you should ever be saved was taken away, a light suddenly breaks all around you and you hear your name being called down the corridors of eternity!
And before you fully know what is happening, you are being violently ripped from the pits of hell, with demons grabbing at your feet and snapping their jaws at you as you take your place in the last place you ever expected to see again: the land of the living. How would that change your perspective?
What kind of conversation do you have with someone who has been raised from the dead? How would you convince them to go back into the very thing that killed them in the first place? How do you tell someone full of this ‘gratitude from the grave’ to sit down and just relax a bit?
Guess what, you don’t, hero. From the moment that they come back from the grave, they will be a step off from everyone else. Believe me, this kind of thing can make normal people nervous around you, to say the least.
But what these church folks do not realize is that even when I was active in church folk circles, the last thing that was on my mind was getting a new wardrobe so that I could fit in with the cutesy church people. All that I had, like Lazarus, were the grave clothes that I had on when I died. That hasn’t changed, and I don’t reckon it ever will. Add to this the new perspective that you gain from being raised from the dead and what you have is someone who doesn’t care one way or the other what you think about them.
Then there is the truth of what that church system has become. I could not go back, ever. I am very angry at the years and the tears that the false church stole from me. I was never willing to just trust what they said. Now, I’ll simply hit first and hit to hurt.
No, in the end, the only thing that you can do with the Lazarus Generation is the very thing that Jesus commanded them to do with the newly-raised Lazarus: “Loose him and let him go!” Just get us free, get out of our way, and let us loose for some payback.
Don’t try to control us, don’t try to understand, and don’t try to change our thinking until it looks more like your own.
Our mission will be to monkey-stomp the enemy and we will do it at any cost.
We who are the Lazarus Generation have something inside that is pushing us. It keeps us up at night with an insistent whisper that says that something is about to happen.
If we don’t play nice, forgive us, we seem to have left our ability to play nice in the grave. If we don’t sound like everyone else, forgive us, we have a different perspective that is driving us. If what we say or do bother you, by all means, forgive us, dying and coming back seems to cause you to cut to the chase.
See you on the outside.
JCS
American Pentecost 