Most people use the word revival and mean a tent meeting, a guest speaker, and an emotional altar call. A week of special services that ends Sunday night while life goes back to normal Monday morning. There is nothing wrong with calling those meetings a revival, but that is not the revival we are learning about in this series.
I have been in meetings where the calendar said revival, but by Monday nothing had really changed. That is not meant as a criticism of special meetings. They are wonderful and a great tool to stir us. It is just that there is a difference between a meeting we schedule and a work God sends.
Revival in the Bible is not something men work up. It is something God sends down.
Habakkuk 3:2 did not say, “Let us revive the work.” He said, “O Lord, revive thy work.”
Psalm 85:6 did not say, “We will revive ourselves.” It said, “Wilt thou not revive us again: that thy people may rejoice in thee?” Revival is a sovereign work of God. He sends it, He sustains it, and He stops it.
Every revival in the Bible has Jesus Christ at the center. The old covenant revivals pointed forward to Him, and the New Testament revivals flow from Him. The Spirit who fell at Pentecost came to glorify Him (John 16:14).
Take Christ out of revival and what is left is a moral improvement campaign. Take Christ out of the church and what is left is a club. Today, we will look at what revival is not, what revival is, and the posture God’s people take when revival comes.
1. What Revival Is Not
Before we can know what revival is, we have to clear away what it is not. Revival has been used to label so many things that the word has lost its weight. Here is what revival is not.
- Revival Is Not the Lost Getting Saved: That is the fruit. Revival is what happens to the church before the fruit comes.
- Revival Is Not New Methods: New songs, new programs, new buildings, or bigger crowds. A church can have all of that and have no revival.
- Revival Is Not Emotion: Tears come in revival, but tears alone do not make a revival. People weep in movies. The question is whether the weeping leads to repentance and the repentance leads to a changed life.
- Revival Is Not a Formula: We are going to walk through patterns God has used in every revival in the Bible. But the patterns describe what happens when God moves. They are not steps to make Him move.
2. What Revival Is
Revival is God restoring life to His people. The word means to bring back to life. To breathe in the cold. To stir up what was sleeping and put fire back where there used to be fire.
Revival is the Holy Ghost making Jesus Christ real again to a church that had grown comfortable with religion about Him. It is the believer who knew the right answers about Christ starting to walk with Christ again.
Isaiah 57:15, “For thus saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy; I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones.”
God lives in two places. The high and holy place and the contrite and humble heart. The same God who fills heaven will come down and revive the broken man who calls on Him. That is the doorway into every revival in the Bible.
3. Our Part Is Posture, Not Production
Zechariah 4:6, “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.”
The most organized church with the best plans cannot manufacture what only God can give. Pentecost happened because Jesus said it would, not because the disciples figured out the formula. The Ephesian revival happened because God ordained it, not because Paul had a strategy.
That does not mean we do nothing. Every revival in the Bible found God’s people in the same posture before the fire fell. Praying, seeking, fasting, and hunger. The patterns we are about to walk through are the positions God’s people have always taken when they wanted Him to send revival.
4. The Patterns We Will Walk Through
Over the next blogs in this series we will look at the patterns God has used in every revival in the Bible:
- The Individual in Revival
- The Prayer in Revival
- The Book in Revival
- The Holy Ghost in Revival
- The Idols in Revival
- The Cost of Revival
- The People of Revival
- The Hindrances of Revival
- The Spreading of Revival
These patterns show up from Asa to Pentecost. In Hezekiah and Josiah. In Ezra and Nehemiah. In Moses, Elijah, and John the Baptist. In Peter at Pentecost and Paul at Ephesus. In the Samaritan woman at the well and the maniac of Gadara. In the upper room and the burned magic books of Acts 19. Every one of them comes back to the same person: Jesus Christ. Revival is the moment He becomes precious again to a people that had drifted from Him.
Read the Whole Series
If you read only this blog you will miss the texture of how God works.
If you are lost, here is what you need before the rest of the series will mean anything. You are a sinner and God is holy. Without Christ, there is a great gulf fixed between you and Him. But God sent His Son Jesus Christ to die on the cross for your sins because He loved you. He was buried, and He rose again the third day. The Bible says in Romans 10:9, “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.” You will never see personal revival until you have first been born again. Call on Christ today.
If you are saved, the same Holy Ghost who fell at Pentecost lives inside you. The fire is not somewhere out there. He is on the inside. Revival is closer than you think.
Read the next blog. We are about to look at the place every revival in the Bible has begun. With one person God could use.
