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The phrase revival speaks of life renewed. It’s about depletion lifted to restoration, refreshing reinvigoration. It’s about weary you and me reenergized with new sparkle in our eyes, new spring in our steps, new metal in our spines. And isn’t that very renewal our fixed want?
God didn’t create us as perpetual movement machines, grinding life out by our personal energies. He created us to want him, and to have him, in his fullness of “grace upon grace” (John 1:16). His limitless grace assembly our limitless want is why the gospel speaks of “newness of life” (Romans 6:4) as normative Christianity — not solely at conversion, however always thereafter, even second by second.
How may it’s in any other case? The Bible summarizes our earthly journey like this: “The Spirit helps us in our weak point” (Romans 8:26). It doesn’t communicate of our “weaknesses” (plural) however of our “weak point” (singular). Why? As a result of it’s not as if we’ve got a weak point on this space of life over right here and one other weak point in that space of life over there. The reality is, weak point pervades the entire of our existence. Weak spot shouldn’t be yet another expertise we’ve got alongside different experiences. Somewhat, weak point is the platform on which we’ve got all our experiences. We’ve got by no means but recognized a single second of non-weakness. However the Holy Spirit helps us in our weak point. And revival is a mighty surge of Spirit-given assist for weak Christians like all of us.
What Is Revival?
What then is revival? Revival is peculiar Christians experiencing extraordinary energy from on excessive, in order that the gospel will get traction in us and thru us with astonishing impression. It can’t be scheduled — not by us, anyway. It’s of God.
My dad and mother have been talking at a Christian faculty within the early Seventies. The Holy Spirit was transferring with reviving energy. With comfortable marvel, the scholars saved saying, “Are you able to imagine that is occurring to us?” That’s not the type of remark we are inclined to make once we execute our personal ministry plan rather well. The divine and miraculous nature of genuine revival is why we make no allowance right here for false, worked-up “revivals” of our personal making.
We disagree with Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875), who famously mentioned, “A revival of faith shouldn’t be a miracle” (Lectures on Revivals of Faith, 10). Finney influenced later generations to imagine {that a} revival is the results of “the proper use of the constituted means.” I disagree. I see revival as a wonderful mega-miracle.
The Bible encourages us to pursue this type of revival with this excellent prayer: “Will you not revive us once more, that your folks could rejoice in you?” (Psalm 85:6). Let’s assume that easy prayer by, asking three questions.
1. Who Does the Reviving?
God does: “Will you not revive us once more?” The truth is, the phrase you is emphatic within the Hebrew textual content. Revival is a piece of God. That’s why we pray for revival.
Can we additionally labor towards revival? Sure. We at all times wish to serve in such a manner as to “put together the way in which of the Lord” (Isaiah 40:3–5). Like Elijah, we construct the altar. However it’s God, and God alone, who sends down the sacred fireplace (1 Kings 18:30–39).
If our church buildings turn out to be swept up into any motion, any dynamic, generated by our personal brilliance or cool, why ought to anybody even care? Why ought to we care? If our church buildings develop by socially acceptable types of shrewd advertising and marketing and stylish packages, then we’re left with a tragedy: church buildings which can be complete failures brilliantly disguised as huge successes. We’re to be dwelling proof that the risen Jesus is definitely transferring on this world — and nothing much less. That is success (if such a phrase even applies).
When our Lord above pours out his Spirit upon us (Acts 2:33), he lifts us into new experiences of his wonder-working grace, with shocking conversions, hidden sins brazenly confessed, damaged relationships tenderly restored, timid Christians publicly emboldened, and so forth. That miracle is revival. To cite the title of a J.I. Packer guide, it’s “God in our midst.” When this occurs, a merely routinized Christianity crumbles, yielding to the powers of revived Christianity.
Jonathan Edwards actually understood revival this manner — as an intervention by God. It’s why, in his writings concerning the First Nice Awakening, he had to make use of phrases like shocking, outstanding, extraordinary, and fantastic to explain what he noticed occurring. Removed from threatening Reformed theology, the God-centeredness of revival validates Reformed theology.
And the beauty of the miracle of revival is that we, even we, can obtain it. We will be as unimpressive as we actually are, however with the gospel and the Holy Spirit, we easy, plodding, and typically exhausted Christians are geared up in each important to obtain afresh the felt presence of the risen Christ with highly effective impact.
2. Who Wants Revival?
We do. The folks of God want revival: “Will you not revive us once more, that your folks could rejoice in you?” Does the world want revival too? In fact. The truth is, the previous prophecy declares that “the earth can be stuffed with the information of the glory of the Lord because the waters cowl the ocean” (Habakkuk 2:14). And our Lord gained’t cease till the very “timber of the forest sing for pleasure” (Psalm 96:12)! However revival begins amongst us, his personal folks.
“Revival is a piece of God. That’s why we pray for revival.”
Can we deny that we want revival? Over the past decade or so, we Bible-believing Christians in America have suffered vital losses. We have been surging ahead. Personally, trying round on the gospel-driven actions amongst us, I used to be pondering, “If we keep low earlier than the Lord and steward this blessing correctly, this might speed up into historic awakening over the subsequent ten or twenty years.”
However we’ve faltered. Our ethical failures, our doctrinal betrayals, our relational fractures — we’ve got taken many hits. From my vantage level, we’re not within the place of power we have been only a few years in the past.
If we expect we don’t want revival, how a lot additional should we fall earlier than our hearts break and we humble ourselves? I imagine that we orthodox, serious-minded, gospel-loving Christians want revival — now. Let’s search the Lord for it.
3. What Distinction Does Revival Make?
A beautiful distinction! “Will you not revive us once more, that your folks could rejoice in you?” Revival gushes with overflowing pleasure in Christ. It’s so cheering to get proper with God and with each other, to get free from previous regrets, to cease hanging again in timidity and face the long run with new confidence within the One who holds “all authority in heaven and on earth” (Matthew 28:18).
I keep in mind a turning level in my very own life in the course of the Jesus Motion of the late Sixties. It was my junior yr in faculty. I used to be tied up in knots with doubts about Christ. My deepest foundations have been being shaken by some dangerous educating. Then God mercifully moved in on me, when some buddies invited me to a Christian rock live performance on New Yr’s Eve 1969.
Once I walked in that night, my coronary heart was heavy with doubt. Three hours later, I floated out with a pleasure I had by no means recognized earlier than. What made the distinction? Not a superb argument (although I actually respect sensible arguments). No, God gave me one thing deeper, and even primal. He gave me comfortable certainty. He gave me pleasure from above, as a first-order, self-authenticating, direct and rapid expertise of Actuality — his very presence.
That evening, I used to be sitting within the Pasadena Civic Auditorium with my buddies, minding my very own enterprise. The curtains parted. There stood a rock band of “Jesus freaks” with their lengthy hair and electrical guitars. They started to play. Think about a mash-up of Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. I beloved it.
However what obtained me was their easy message. The track that completely wrecked me riffed on this call-and-response lyric: “Jesus loves me; I like Jesus.” (Evidently, this was not the normal kids’s track “Jesus Loves Me”!) These direct, sincere, uncomplicated gospel phrases landed on me as an astonishingly vivid and luminous new thought.
Prayers We Received’t Remorse
By God’s reviving energy, on that evening in Pasadena, his message was experientialized to my coronary heart as actual — extra actual than the rest in all this world. It entered my being at a degree down beneath my doubts. These phrases exploded in my expertise with a pleasure I couldn’t deny — and I didn’t wish to. Naturally, I nonetheless had many questions, and much more questions. However now I used to be free to assume all of it by with a joyous confidence that Jesus supplied every little thing I used to be searching for. And I’ve by no means been the identical since.
What if we study ourselves for each hint of improperly restricted Christian expertise? What if we dare to ask the Lord to guide us into contemporary inexperienced pastures and beside new nonetheless waters, in order that we rejoice in him as by no means earlier than? What if we let him resolve whether or not our Christianity in the present day is all that he can provide us? What if all we provide him is our humble openness — our open Bibles with our open hearts? Do we actually worry that we might finally remorse going that low earlier than our gracious Lord and Savior?
“Will you not revive us once more, that your folks could rejoice in you?” Could Psalm 85:6 seize our hearts and by no means allow us to go!
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