Cornflakes and Christ Awakenings

Cornflakes and Christ Awakenings

Has your walk with Christ started going stale? Do you lack that feeling of excitement about Jesus you once felt? Has he grown a little distant to you? Is your relationship with him in need of a fresh spark? Or maybe an entirely new start?

How would you like to be reintroduced to God’s Son for ALL he really is today? How would you like to meet your Savior again—in a way that feels like it’s for the very first time?

Well, then this story is for you!

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This post is an edited excerpt from David’s latest book, Christ Is NOW!

Seven Groundbreaking Keys to Help You Explore and Experience the

Spectacular Supremacy of God’s Son Today. [Shop here]

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It’s about a breakfast cereal that, in its own way, faced the same problem: Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.

In the late 1980s, the Kellogg Company realized sales of their most popular product, corn flakes—featured on grocery shelves for over one hundred years—were starting to lag seriously. It seemed their customers were experiencing the adage “Familiarity breeds contempt”—or at least indifference.

But an amusingly creative advertising scheme turned everything around. A series of 30-second commercials were developed for TV, supposedly introducing a NEW cereal. In each episode, someone holds a bowl of the “new” cereal and talks about how simple, plain, and boring this cereal looks, but then after tasting a spoonful of the corn flakes, he or she suddenly breaks into a huge smile of delightful rediscovery! Every time, as the commercial fades, an offscreen man speaks up: “Kellogg’s Corn Flakes—taste them again for the first time.”

That’s exactly what needs to happen for you. To borrow from the ads, I would say it this way:

“Jesus Christ: You need to meet him again for the first time.”

Does either of these experiences feel familiar to you?

At a ten-year class reunion, you get into a conversation with an old girlfriend who used to join you at sports events and parties. Now as the two of you talk a decade later, you realize she is far more interesting, more personable, more talented, more inspiring than she ever appeared to be back then. In a sense, you meet her again for the first time.

As an avid NBA fan, you end up in the locker room with some of your hometown team heroes after a game, asking them for autographs. As they sign your program, allowing you to interact with them up close and personal, it’s apparent they are far warmer, more down-to-earth, and more open-hearted than you had assumed based on how fiercely they battle out on the court. You see them in a new light. In other words, you meet them again for the first time.

Now envision this: What if similarly striking encounters with different people happened to you practically every day?

But then envision this: What if these amazing, daily discoveries were always about the very same person?

Most importantly, what if that person happened to be the single most consequential individual in all creation, throughout all history, and for all eternity?

I’m talking about Jesus the Christ, the Son of God, the King of heaven, the Lord of the nations, the Redeemer of the world!

And what if this happened? What if you started to realize that many previous reports about him often repeated among believers were flawed at best—diminishing him by misguided opinions and misleading claims?

What if you found him to be so much greater than his current reputation, much more alive and active, and also much more astonishing, much more appealing, much more awesome—and much more approachable than you’d been led to believe?

What if you kept on personally encountering Jesus over and over, day after day? What if this happened to you in such unexpectedly fresh and surprising ways that it seemed that with each new rendezvous you were meeting your Lord and Savior AS IF for the first time?

Here’s How All of This
Keeps Happening to Me

For over forty years, I’ve been caught up in an extraordinary journey with Jesus precisely like this. To be sure, at times it has run hot and cold, fearful then bold, with ups and downs, in the light plus through the night.

Yet for me, this Spirit-guided course has remained a steady trek in the same direction—toward an ever more astonishing wealth of disclosures about who our Lord is today in the fullness of his spectacular supremacy.

And that brings me to you.

Finally, after decades of writing parallel books that actually foreshadow this volume, I offer you my magnum opus (chief work). Christ Is NOW! shares with you my distillation of exciting insights about our Redeemer King—uncovered while I was “meeting him again for the first time”—over and over and over.

In these pages, I hand you keys that will unlock doors into the wide-open spaces of a renewed vision of and involvement with God’s Son in all of his greatness and goodness and glory. You’ll find these insights to be simple but also comprehensive, practical but also radical, breathtaking but also life-giving. Rooted in God’s Word, they will reintroduce you to the Lord Jesus Christ to help you see him for all he is right now.

In its approach lies a way for you to move into deeper intimacy with your Savior, not just in terms of who he was or who he will be, but in terms of who he is today. I think you’ll find this approach truly is groundbreaking. I believe that long before you finish reading Christ Is NOW!, you will begin undergoing a genuine “Christ Awakening”—which is my great hope not only for you but for the entire Body of Christ.

The Hope at Hand: The Reformation That Must Come

Unfolding in answer to decades of concerted prayer globally, a nationwide and worldwide Christ Awakening movement, many believe, is at hand.

An awakening to the Lord Jesus Christ is urgently needed because far too many of this generation of Christians are slumbering concerning the full extent of the supremacy of Christ now. J. I. Packer says most believers have only pieces of him. John Stott calls us pigmy Christians because we worship a pigmy Christ. The late Chuck Colson suggested evangelicals have made him a “product” to meet our needs as consumers. Kendra Creasy Dean’s research reports that many Christian youths have lost true passion for Jesus. William Willimon concludes that the reigning Christ is essentially “missing” for us in the thick of all we try to do for him.

We need a grander exaltation of God’s Son that is able to breathe new passion into God’s people to advance his kingdom purposes at this moment of history, yet we remain asleep. Here’s how American theologian Kevin Vanhoozer puts it (emphasis added): “Present-day Christians need to awaken to the glory of the transfigured, risen Christ in our midst, and we need to stay awake so that we, like the disciples, see ‘no one but Jesus only’ (Matt. 17:8).”

Said another way, we need a “Christological reformation”—one in which God’s people wake up to meet God’s Son all over again, as if it were for the first time, thus re-forming their whole vision of all he is.

On November 1, 1517, citizens of Wittenberg, Germany, found nailed to their church doors an extensive, militant document that spread rapidly throughout Europe due to a recently invented “social media” called the printing press. The Protestant Reformation, which had been brewing for decades, was unleashed!

Today, in a very real sense like those “95 Theses,” Christ Is NOW!, along with our ChristNow.com social media delivery systems—website resources, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, blog posts, videos, ebooks—are issuing a similarly radical call for a reformation of—a magnification of—the Church’s vision of who Christ is right now.

Many define this fresh work from heaven as a Christ Awakening. A Christ Awakening is a revolution of one’s entire life in Christ. It comes about as the Spirit of God uses the Word of God to enable believers to meet the Son of God for ALL he is as he’s seated on the throne of heaven—making it feel as if we are meeting him again, as if it were for the very first time.

Every Christ Awakening—whether for one single Jesus follower or for an entire body of believers—eventually unleashes a grassroots insurgency set on waking up the whole Church to become wholly alive to the whole Christ.

And when that happens, it will not—it cannot—be contained within the Church! It will flow like a life-giving river into all of the sin-sick world that so desperately needs Jesus.

Talk about a fresh start with Jesus—this is it!

Why should we ever settle for less? Why should you?

Take ONE step towards experiencing your OWN Christ Awakening while at the same time praying for a NATIONWIDE Christ Awakening. Can you imagine seeing multitudes of people in all parts of our nation coming to Jesus, being filled with Spirit, being set free from sins and addictions of all kinds! It has happened before, and it will happen again!

You can be a part of bringing that to pass! Yes, YOU! Each week, listen to at least two or three episodes of the CHRIST TODAY Podcast series titled “YOU and the Coming Christ Awakening” (episodes 74-140). Maybe you could start with the three-part series “How to pray for and gain a true Christ Awakening”—episodes 138-140. But browse the titles and choose however the Holy Spirit leads. Begin today!

NOTE: This blog post was originally posted on July 5, 2019. But its focus and content are more relevant now than when it was first published.

About the Author

Over the past 40 years, David Bryant has been defined by many as a “messenger of hope” and a “Christ proclaimer” to the Church throughout the world. Formerly a minister-at-large with the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, president of Concerts of Prayer International (COPI), and chairman of America’s National Prayer Committee, David now provides leadership to ChristNow.com and Proclaim Hope!, whose mission is to foster and serve Christ-awakening movements. Order his widely read books at DavidBryantBooks.com.

2 Comments
  1. Cynthia Fagaly 6 years ago

    I wake and talk with Jesus daily.

    • Author
      David Bryant 6 years ago

      Wonderful, Cynthia! Keep it up. He has so much of himself he wants to share with you and so much of his Kingdom purposes in which he wants to involve you for his glory. David

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