Bible Lesson 195

REVIVAL

For thus says the High and Lofty One, Who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: “I dwell in the high and holy place, with him who has a contrite and humble spirit, To revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones.” Isaiah 57:15

“SOMETIMES WE ARE INCLINDED TO THINK THAT A VERY GREAT PORTION OF MODERN REVIVALISM HAS BEEN MORE A CURSE THAN A BLESSING, BECAUSE IT HAS LED THOUSANDS TO A KIND OF PEACE BEFORE THEY KNOW THEIR MISERY; RESTORING THE PRODIGAL TO THE FATHER’S HOUSE, AND NEVER MAKING HIM SAY, ‘FATHER I HAVE SINNED’. CHARLES H. SPURGEON.

We in America, at least, like to talk about revival, preach about revival, sing about revival, and once a year at a certain time we even schedule revivals, as if revival was something that we can control . Revival is a gift from God, just like every other good gift we receive is from God. Listen to me closely now’.. There is no magic formula, no mechanical means, no prescription that will bring revival to a group that has moved away from God or who, in fact, never really knew God.

Revival is something that God uses to ‘renew’ that newness of life that is spoken of in Romans chapter 6 and verse 4, where God inspired the writer of Romans to tell us that, in salvation we die to sin and live to Christ, and it says “Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.”

Revival becomes necessary whenever the life of Christ in a church congregation has become dull and dead to the glory of God. It is a shame that something like that should happen but we being the kind of people that we are, tend to require that we be continually revived to keep us on the right path. Probably the reason, or at least one of the reasons that revival is required is that Preachers, Pastors and Teachers all tend to live in a rut. We all should know that a ‘rut’ is simply a grave with both ends knocked out.

When our leaders and our pew-mates lose their first love, that fire that burns in our bones and drives us out to learn the gospel and then go out to tell the good news to others, we all tend to become apathetic, and we lay down our arms and take up simpler jobs, that does not require as much of our time and our effort. That’s when revival is needed, but as we said before, it does not come at our call, it only comes when God decides to, in His own time, sends us some one or ones who have a heart for true revival and it normally only comes when that one or two or more, will not give up their heart-felt, and Spirit driven, seeking, knocking, and ask God to send us a Holy Spirit revival.

When was the last time that any of us witnessed a true revival’ I don’t know that I have witnessed one in the over eighty years that I have been alive. Oh, yes, we see what is promoted to be a revival where a preacher who really does not have revival on his heart, shows up and blows up and then blows out of town after normally three days. Real revivals take time and I mean real time, quality time and tears and pleading and praying for the souls of the lost in our churches and our communities. Someone has said that in real revival, people came together and prayed and worshipped until God sent His Spirit to set them straight. That sometimes took days, weeks and even months. Now in our day we have shrunk revival to our time, normally Sunday, trough Wednesday; and if we are not careful, we will limit it to the time that some go outside the church on smoke break. It is recorded that in that Great Welsh revival there was no advance publicity, no choirs, no song books, no famous preacher although great preachers were in attendance but they sat in the congregation with the others in need of revival.

All these people wanted and finally had in their revival was the Presence of God. They did not, ‘pack the pew’, ‘Kiss a pig’, ‘dive off the church steeple into a bowl of milk’, ‘no sports heroes’, ‘no convention staff ”nothing but a heart for God. Of course it will be hard for today’s churches to have real revival because we have fallen in love with ourselves, our congregation, our church, our pastor, etc and we now feel no love for Christ. Revival happens when the church falls in love with Jesus Christ enough to obey all that He has commanded of us. Today’s revivals all too often include a lot of activity, which many accept as revival. Activity indicates that the church may be the church turning over, rather than waking up. We need to wake up but we cannot stop there, we must get up, and go out, and do what God commanded us to do in the great commission, and since most do not seem to know what God wants from us, we are told in the Great Commission, that we are to “Go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Matthew 28:19-20. Knowing that, if you were asked by someone today, how many times have you witnessed like Christ said to witness’.what could you say’

The best way to keep a church alive is to give them regular doses of the blood of Jesus Christ, that means preaching the Bible, not preaching some psychology, or somebody’s book of fantasies. Preaching is done by God’s man, taking God’s Word, and standing and using God’s written Word, reproving sin regardless of who is offended, Rebuking sinners regardless of who or what they may be, and exhorting those who are not guilty of sin, to continue in their faithful walk with Christ. (2nd Timothy 4:2). We have instead of reprove, rebuke, exhort being the furrow that we plow we have gotten off into that smooth, soft, ground that does not require us to break ground as we do when we farm. We found that everybody in our congregations likes that preaching that really never reaches a point, never pricks, or cuts their hearts like Peter’s Sermon, after the day of Pentecost had come there in Acts Chapter 2. It might do us good to read that entire chapter before we proceed to examine our need for revival.

Notice there in Acts that Peter did not preach by apologizing for the sin of the people in crucifying the Sinless Son of God, Jesus Christ. He reproved the act, rebuked those responsible for the act and exhorted them to seek salvation. We don’t hear much reproving, rebuking and exhorting in preaching today, what we do now is chatter, make excuses, and in that we are denying the need for any repentance. I never pass up the opportunity to expose those preachers who preach in such a way as to make those who are in open sin, feel good about their sin, and even to take the mantel upon themselves, admitting to be the worst sinner in the church. I want you to understand dear brothers and sisters, you can sin, and even may sin, but any preacher who recommends sin to you does not love you because sin separates you from God, as long as that sin goes unrepented. God never changes and we know that sin separates a person from God. (Isaiah 59:2; Romans 3:23). Truly saved (born again, obedient, children of God) people, who sin, must go back to that bloody cross where our Savior bled and died, to receive forgiveness for any sin they commit (1st John 2:1).

What would you think of a person who continually failed to stop at red-lights, railroad crossing, and dangerous intersections’ Probably you would think that he was courting death, and I agree, so why are we so unconcerned about sin’ Yes, I realize that there are ‘good’ men, kind men who preach the lie that God does not mind when we sin or even the impossibility of being Saints, instead they classify themselves and everyone else as sinners. Sinner was our state when we were supernaturally saved by the power of God, because of the blood and death of Christ; however, if we are saved, we are not sinners, we are Saints. We cannot have it both ways, we must be one way or the other and the Saints will go to heaven and the sinners will all go to hell.

Those who preach that saved people are sinners are denying the power of Christ to have any effect on those whom God saved. Christ died in your place and if God had loved sinners, and will accept sinners into heaven, then there was no need for the cross. I think we settle for the least possible assistance when we preach that a saved person is a sinner. We have the finest and the best who preach and claim that salvation means nothing in the saved person’s life. God does not simply knock the dents out of the old banged up person and put a new paint job on them and then adopt them into His family. What God does is to put that old creature to death, and He raises up a brand new creature, who will walk in newness of life (Ephesians 2:10; Romans 6:1-14; 2nd Corinthians 5:17; Philippians 2:13). The saved person has the same flesh that they had before however that flesh has been sanctified and justified. We look the same but nothing about us is the same, we have been recreated, Justified, Sanctified and even glorified, and we have the mind of Christ (Ephesians 2:10; Romans 5:1-8; 1st Corinthians 6:9-11: Romans 8:30).

Understand me now’I’m not saying that a Saint never sins, what I am saying is that it is not a good idea to sin if you are a saint; because then you become guilty of trampling the blood of Jesus Christ underfoot. When a Saint sins, their sin separates them from God until they repent and return to God. God does not hear their prayers and he turns His face away from them because God will not look on sin. (1st John 2:1). Read 1st John 2:1 and notice that it says “My little children, these things I write to you, that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.” That says to us that we should not sin, we strive and pray and walk close to Christ to keep sin out of our lives ‘.however, if a Saint sins, they have an Advocate with the Father and that is Jesus Christ. That verse makes it clear that sin is a possibility, not a probability. We do not have to sin, and if we do, it is because we have defied God and the cross of Christ to do so. If a true Saint sins, they do not lose their salvation, because once saved always saved. That means if you were ever truly saved, ‘quickened by God’ brought from darkness into light and recreated, you will always walk with God in His Son Jesus Christ. Philippians 1:6.

You may be asking’what has all of what brobob has written have to do with Revival, and I tell you that it has everything to do with Revival, because unless you have ever been saved, you cannot be revived. Revival is about taking a group of saved people and lighting their fire, waking them up and making them stand for God. Sadly some congregations do as we use to say”flame out” they lose their first love and that does not mean that they do not love Jesus Christ anymore’.it means that they love him less than they should and did in the beginning. Their church leaders have allowed their minds and hearts to wonder. They became soft and comfortable with preaching as mere background noise. Christians sometime have to be prodded and reminded that God does not have secret agents or free agents.

Every Christian has a job, and his duty is to continually be reflecting the light of Christ and the depravity of sinful man to a world of darkness; however we have fallen way short of that duty. We seem to have been practicing short cuts to heaven and hardly any effort to holiness and willful neglect of witnessing. In short we are as a great old preacher has said’.we are many but we are not much. Compare us to the disciples (first church), they were a simple few and yet they turned the world upside down. Compare that to the visible church of our day, and you will find that we exist in the millions , in churches that are so many that you can stand in the door of one and spit and hit another, and the communities around most of them are going to hell in a hand-basket. Why is that’ It is because the church has been taken over in many cases by the devil and the world. Sometimes I wonder if most church leaders really want a revival. When God sends revival, it comes in great power and judgment and it will sometime act as a cleansing agent in our midst. We have been wrong for so long that we are not sure what our church would look like if God really visited and turned the lights on.

As a rule what we want from a revival is to hear some dynamic preacher-evangelist who comes like a whirl wind and kicks up a lot of dust and uses worldly lure to draw people to the altars. As far as I can tell that kind of stuff doesn’t accomplish much. If most Churches were to invite a real man of God who came and simply opened his Bible and preached the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, it would run most of the worldly members off from the church and that would affect the offering and we have to have that to pay the bills.

Do you see where I’m going with this’ We really are in a lot of cases so far over what we should be in debt, that we fear hurting anyone’s feelings or causing anyone to rethink their salvation. That plus the level of tolerance of any and everything that we have been taught, by worldly denominations puts us in a bind. Too many people have been saved by preachers, teachers, friend and neighbors and the churches of our day that we have completely lost the idea of salvation being anything other than our decision to walk an aisle, shake a preachers hand and be dunked in that churches baptistery, that there is no power in salvation, it is much like our usual breakfast or our work or our play. Instead of having an experience with God we perform the usual performance of walking the aisle and joining a church, which means nothing. How can we over look who it is that planned, initiated, oversaw, and purchased our salvation. We act as if it was nothing, and many times it is worth nothing.

We are more or less joining a club, putting on the colors of our gang, but we have no power because we have focused our faith on self or some other object rather than God and Jesus Christ. We really expect nothing and that is what we get! If we are honest with ourselves, most of the time what churches are really after when they hold one of these ‘revivals’ is adding members to our group. It is too dangerous to make much noise about any of our special group needing to be tuned up, it will make them mad so we normally leave off making too much of revival. Preachers get too involved in the visible church rather than the Bride of Christ, the real church. Whether they mean to or not, they come to depend upon the offering as their source, rather than God.

It has been said and I think it is true that the best way to see a revival is to set the pulpit and the preacher on fire for God. We can be sure that God has a line that we dare not cross and we know that we have passed that line and are so far across it that we can’t see it any longer. We can either get right with God or we will face His judgment, which could be that God would take his hand off of our country and let the devil have us. We don’t have to undergo that but unless we get over our narcissistic love of self and look up to God and get in the dirt before Him we know He will, we just don’t know when. Now in closing let me say that God hears fervent prayers of true children of His, so if you are saved, begin to knock, seek and ask, until God will use your efforts’.pray for revival.

Until next time,

may God bless and keep you

This is Bro. Bob