You've probably heard of the proverbial "ear worm." Well, the last several weeks I've had a "text worm." And it's a strange one to have playing around in your head over and over. Here it is:

"When a defiling evil spirit is expelled from someone, it drifts along through the desert looking for an oasis, some unsuspecting soul it can bedevil. When it doesn't find anyone, it says, 'I'll go back to my old haunt.' On return it finds the person spotlessly clean, but vacant. It then runs out and rounds up seven other spirits more evil than itself and they all move in, whooping it up. That person ends up far worse off than if he'd never gotten cleaned up in the first place.

"That's what this generation is like: You may think you have cleaned out the junk from your lives and gotten ready for God, but you weren't hospitable to my kingdom message, and now all the devils are moving back in." (Matthew 12:43-45)

There's a whole lot one could say about this parable, but what is quite intriguing is that the purpose of this story is not to give instruction as to what ministering to the demonized is to be like, but rather to give a warning to "a generation" of people who have experienced a measure of reform and renewing work, not unlike our movement and indeed much of the Church going through various times of renewal and revival over the last decades, but haven't then leaned into the way of faith and kingdom life that is to be lived out from there.

NT Wright sums this parable up like this:

"This generation is like a person who has been exorcized, but the demon may return and 'repossess'—with several others. All right, you've had your great revolution, and it worked in its way. You have swept and cleaned as best you can, with new programmes of Torah-teaching and personal piety. The Temple itself is standing there, in working order. But it's still empty. The demons will return, and this generation will end up worse off than it was before.

It isn't difficult to work out what Jesus meant by all this. His point was not to describe what normally happens when someone is exorcized. If this is what tends to happen after exorcisms, it would be better not to do them in the first place. He was using the danger of 'repossession' to make a sharp comment, at the end of the long discussion of where he got his power from, about the danger that his countrymen were facing. They had had all kinds of reforms, but unless the 'house' got a new 'inhabitant', the demons they had expelled would return with others as well. Arrogance, violence, hatred, darkness, sometimes masquerading as obedience to God's will—all these things would come in and wreck everything. Jesus had urged them to repent of all this, and to accept his kingdom-way, but they hadn't done so. They needed to know that they were inviting disaster."

Wright, T. (2004). Matthew for Everyone, Part 1: Chapters 1-15 (p. 154). Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

Hence, after even after Jesus engaging in three years of public ministry declaring and demonstrating the coming of the inbreaking Kingdom of Heaven, and all kinds of wonderful, dare I say, renewal meetings with even the dead being raised, we still observe the need for Jesus to "cleanse the temple" of injustice and the characterization of its priestly leadership as ones who were "white washed sepulchers" as the crowds that are following him are diminishing with each step taking him closer and closer to the cross and his disciples on the very verge of betraying and denying him in various and sundry ways.

I do empathize with the longing to see another, or even more, breakthrough in some of the classic ways of the reviving and renewing work of the Spirit - and yes, it doesn't have to look or be experienced the same way as before, I'm privy to all the caveats and conditions - but the call to the, as Wimber would say, "main and the plain" is never redundant. In fact, it is paramount.

There will always be subsequent waves of the Spirit,  just as surely as there are the ever intensifying and increasing birth pangs of an expectant mother until delivery - the Welsh Revival after the Great Awakening, the Asbury after the Toronto, the Silent Revival after the Pensacola Outpouring - the Father is always at work and the Kingdom is ever advancing, so perhaps our call, our stewarding if you will, is to be sure the house is filled with Spirit's fruit, the Spirit's transforming work and presence and the Spirit's healing grace that brings us into conformity with the mind, will and character of Christ.

Step by step.