For the past two weeks, I have joined a group of guys praying each workday at 2:30 p.m. What started the electronic gathering was a mutual desire to see a movement of God in our church and the Church. That movement, we refer to a “revival.”
Early in my pastoring, I gave a considerable amount of time to praying and organizing prayer efforts beseeching God to bring Revival. Being young, energetic, and idealistic, I was disturbed by the lack of zeal in the churches I pastored. I saw a discrepancy between the fever in the pulpit and the pews. I pleaded with God and thrashed the congregation, doing what felt urgently right.
Nothing happened. The congregation seemed to like sermons “stepping on their toes” and God, well, I didn’t know what He was thinking. As the years passed, I believe He showed me a couple of aspects concerning Revival. First, a prayer for Revival is not like ordering something on Amazon, waiting for UPS to pull up in a big truck, and offload at the church doors. Second, Revival is not a mass thing. It doesn’t happen to a church. It comes to individual believers. As it turned out, God was indeed sending Revival all along. But, like manna in the wilderness, the consumer must go out each morning to collect it. If there is no collecting, there will be no revival.
Third, Revival is not that all non-attending or irregular attendees are coming or returning to church. Attendance does not equate to spirituality. If the church presents the Gospel in a fashion that does not connect with the lives of the people in the pew, they will find alternative ways to get their needs met; sports, sleeping, etc. If the Gospel presentation fails to satisfy their needs when they attended and has not changed, it’s highly probable they will soon stray again. We seem to think Revival needs to occur in the non-active backsliders out there. Or we desire God to up the dose to our spiritual joy drug; make us feel good, healthy, invincible, acceptable, and even excellent. We see no reason why God does not just “fill us” with His Spirit as we are.
By the time I retired, I had given up praying for Revival to sweep through my church. It is what it is, so just deal with it was my unspoken mantra. I concluded God would do what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it. The best I could do was to focus my longing for God’s presence to be manifested clearly in the circumstances of my daily living. They were not going to discourage me. And they didn’t. Well, they did at times, but that’s another whole volume in the progress of this pilgrim.
I joined this group because Jeff Morris, whom I much respect and have dearly come to love, asked me to. I don’t know if “revival” will come to God’s Church or my church, or my non-attending church, but it has come anew to me. I have come to think the intense longing for God to be Almighty in and through His people is the Revival. He has invited me, Fred, such as I am, to love and brood over His creation with Him.
Perhaps, when Revival comes to my church, and the Church, we must expect two things: First, joy at the fresh and deeper living in his love; and, two, to share in His burden for those who grieve Him by the spurning of His love. We love the “joy” part of Revival. But it doesn’t last as long as the burden we share with Him. Faith, at least in part, is not allowing godlessness to overshadow the presence of Light of the World in our attitude.
Photo – Scooting about in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua
Baldwin Heirlooms 