Wonderful to be with you.
I actually expected to hear any day that this had been called off because the fires of Goleta had swept over you. But now I find out nobody worried about that at all. You know, we got a distorted view on the East Coast, too, of what is really going on here. This is a much finer state than I was led to believe in New York.
I’m glad to be here in ministry with my brother. I want to share a cluster of Scriptures, and I’ll ask that, as you read them, you would enter into the feeling and spirit of these precious words that we come to tonight.
I’ve always thought a good echo makes me sound so much more holy and godly. But I see you’ve taken it off. Okay, it’s back to reality. Here we go.
Psalm 80, right in the middle of a cluster of the Psalms of Asaph. Here we hear his prayer.
O give ear, Shepherd of Israel,
Thou that leadest Joseph like a flock;
Thou that sittest above the cherubim, shine forth
Before Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh.
Stir up Thy power, and come to save us.Turn us again, O God;
And cause Thy face to shine, and we shall be saved.O Lord God of hosts,
How long wilt Thou be angry against the prayer of Thy people?
Thou hast fed them with the bread of tears,
And given them tears to drink in large measure.
Thou makest us a strife unto our neighbors;
And our enemies laugh among themselves.Turn us again, O God of hosts;
And cause Thy face to shine, and we shall be saved.Thou broughtest a vine out of Egypt:
Thou didst drive out the nations, and plantedst it.
Thou preparedst room before it,
And it took deep root, and filled the land.
The mountains were covered with the shadow of it,
And the boughs thereof were like cedars of God.
It sent out its branches unto the sea,
And its shoots unto the River.Why hast Thou broken down its fences,
So that all they that pass by the way do pluck it?
The boar out of the wood doth ravage it,
And that which moveth in the field feedeth on it.
Turn again, we beseech Thee, O God of hosts:
Look down from heaven, and behold, and visit this vine,
And the stock which Thy right hand planted,
And the branch that Thou madest strong for Thyself.It is burned with fire, it is cut down:
They perish at the rebuke of Thy countenance.
Let Thy hand be upon the man of Thy right hand,
Upon the son of man whom Thou madest strong for Thyself.
So shall we not go back from Thee:
Quicken us, and we will call upon Thy name.Turn us again, O Lord God of hosts;
Cause Thy face to shine, and we shall be saved.
Repent ye therefore, and turn again, that your sins may be blotted out,
That so there may come seasons of refreshing from the presence of the Lord;
And that He may send the Christ Who hath been appointed for you, even Jesus:
Whom the heaven must receive until the times of restoration of all things,
Whereof God spake by the mouth of His holy prophets that have been from of old.
And Elijah said unto Ahab, Get thee up, eat and drink; for there is the sound of abundance of rain.
So Ahab went up to eat and to drink.
But Elijah went up to the top of Carmel; and he bowed himself down upon the earth, and put his face between his knees.And he said to his servant, Go up now, look toward the sea.
And he went up, and looked, and said, There is nothing.
And he said, Go again seven times.And it came to pass at the seventh time, that he said, Behold, there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man’s hand.
And he said, Go up, say unto Ahab, Make ready thy chariot, and get thee down, that the rain stop thee not.And it came to pass in a little while, that the heaven grew black with clouds and wind, and there was a great rain.
And Ahab rode, and went to Jezreel.
And the hand of the Lord was on Elijah; and he girded up his loins, and ran before Ahab to the entrance of Jezreel.
Awake, awake, put on thy strength, O Zion;
Put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city:
For henceforth there shall no more come into thee the uncircumcised and the unclean.
Shake thyself from the dust; arise, sit thee down, O Jerusalem:
Loose thyself from the bands of thy neck, O captive daughter of Zion.
O Lord, I have heard Thy report, and am afraid:
O Lord, revive Thy work in the midst of the years;
In the midst of the years make it known;
In wrath remember mercy.
We’ll use those verses to get started. Why don’t we just have another prayer?
Lord, we thank You so much for Your precious Word. We receive now the Word spoken, the letter of the Word; but how we need the Spirit of the Word to revive us, to quicken us, and to bring us into that which You have prepared.
Lord, in these times, now, Lord, I look to You, depending upon the Holy Spirit to speak words beyond words and to stir up hearts deeper than the surface. Lord, we thank You that in this day You are apprehending Your people, and in this day giving us amazing grace to overcome, to swim upstream, to do Your will.
As we’ve gathered together for these days, we’re thankful for every soul that’s here. It’s so wonderful that we’ve traveled from here and there and gotten here safely, with others on the way. Lord, we pray, incorporate us all into Your living Word throughout the weekend—through my brother DeVern, myself, and the fellowship times we have together.
Lord, may it be a time where Your rhema and logos are truly upon us, doing the work You want to do. We give this time now into Your hands. Work in our hearts, Lord. Work in our hearts. We pray in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
I said that, to me, the theme verse that I want to share is this: “Revive Thy work in the midst of the years; in the midst of the years make it known; in wrath remember mercy.”
I want to share with you, in the times that I have, the larger work of God’s reviving. The Lord always wants to revive His children if they have fallen from the life that He has chosen for us. Reviving means to live again.
I don’t know what reviving means to you. Revival—I don’t know how you feel about that. I remember when I first got saved, I came under the influence of a very precious preacher named Stephen Olford, who was of the old Keswick tradition. He was very much a revivalist.
I remember, if you wanted to see him become spiritually excited, just mention the word revival, and things got stirred up. He wrote a book, A Heart-Cry for Revival, and our dear brother went about preaching in all kinds of meetings, always praying for revival for God’s church and God’s people.
Those of us who have been around a long time have seen a lot of church revivals, and we’ve seen a lot of yo-yoing, going up and down. Some revival is short-lived, and sometimes even those revivals that we wanted for our own church so desperately never seemed to really reach the mark.
Somehow, I feel in part it is because we had a short goal ourselves in view. The Lord really has so much more in this: “Revive Thy work, O Lord, in the midst of the years.” He doesn’t crush us down to scrap the whole thing and start again. The Lord has the wisdom to revive us in the midst of it. Quite an amazing thing.
But it does include reviving on a number of different levels, beginning with the individual. So many times we find David, especially in Psalm 119, saying, “Revive me, Lord. Revive me.” What a precious prayer.
“Revive me, Lord, according to Thy lovingkindness. Revive me, Lord, according to Thy ways.” But mostly he said, “Revive me according to Thy Word.” He found, as he studied the precious Word—of course, Psalm 119 is testimony to that—the reviving of God in his soul as he thought upon the precepts and the beauty of God through His Word.
So there is that individual reviving. Then, of course, there is this matter of church reviving, which the Lord has to do in our lives. I don’t know what you think about your particular assembly, whether they need reviving or not. I don’t know if you even believe in that kind of thing.
Since I started out in sort of a Baptist tradition, you know, in our own church, you had at least one revival every year, whether you needed it or not. They always had it.
When I went up in the country in Indiana—I was going to school down in Louisville—I went to an agricultural community, a rural area, and I determined that the best time to have revival was just before school started for me. It was convenient for me, but the farmers said, “It’ll never work. This is harvest time. We can’t have revival in harvest time.”
Well, it was the worst revival they ever had in the church, because you have to set the time up at the right time. And up at the front of the Baptist church, you have to set up this machine. Now, most of you, not being Baptists, don’t know about it, but Baptists actually have a machine that’s called a rededicator.
What you do is preach as strong as you can, and you bring people up and grind them through the rededicator. They rededicate their lives, and they give up smoking, drinking, cursing, chewing, and all kinds of evil sins. They come out on the other side kind of flat and holy, but they soon puff back up.
So every year you bring out the big rededicating machine. Really, in a lot of those church revivals, not too many people got saved, so you had to do something. So all the saints decided to go through the mill once a year. That’s the basic deal.
I don’t know. I preached a lot of revivals. I don’t know why, but people thought I was good at it or something, so I did it a lot. But I was dissatisfied with what would happen on the other side.
Because the Lord wants to revive something so much more—something not only individual, something not only touching the church, but something touching the work of God and, indeed, something touching the world.
How do you feel about revival? Do you think we need it, even as touching our nation?
I must say, I stand actually ashamed a bit at our government’s total inability to do anything. It’s just a breakdown on so many quarters. I’m not going to be a Bush blamer. I just think the whole thing is so askew right now, and the man is an embarrassed mess. I don’t think it’s all his fault.
But we have come to such a deadlock, and it is all self-serving. We should be ashamed. This isn’t the nation the forefathers dreamed of, where everybody is out for himself. You form coalitions of greed and all—well, I don’t need to go into that. But revival touches the nation as well.
Somewhere, I believe, perhaps deep in your heart, deeper than is shown on the surface of a happy smile, you also have this burden: “O Lord, revive Thy work in the midst of the years.”
I hope, in the times that I share, maybe a little bit of this will come out. I’d like to begin by telling you what I believe is very good news.
The harbingers of revival have come on the scene.
Now, before there is ever a real reviving of God, there are these birds—prayer birds. They start lining up on the electric lines above the streets, praying for revival.
There is something quite wonderful happening, and most of it is completely unorganized. To me, I believe there are three evidences that we are right on the brink of something from the hand of God—another outpouring of mercy for this day in our generation.
The first evidence is that, as I travel around and go from place to place, there are harbingers. There are prayer people who are just praying, and they won’t let God alone about it until the Lord does something about this mess. I think that is just grand.
It’s happening in so many places, and I’m getting suspicious, because the Lord always sets out these harbingers before He pours out. He always wants somebody asking Him to pour out. He’s waiting to pour out. He wants to pour out, but He has to have people asking.
I think it is happening in a very sovereign way. I don’t think we have to join a club—the Harbinger Club. No, I think maybe the Lord is setting some of your hearts on this whole thing.
The second symptom, a sign that perhaps we’re at the brink, is desperation. There are some people whose souls are vexed by the blatant evil of Sodom in our midst—unchecked, in your face, making it hard even to live and mind your own business.
It is not even a question of confronting evil; it is a question of having evil smudged all over you, until your soul is vexed and you demand that something be done. You know, it takes desperation for us to move, usually.
Some people have just had it with seeing the oppression of the righteous. Some people have a hunger and thirst for righteousness, and a desire for the King to manifest Himself upon this earth. It is a holy desperation that only God can put in our hearts, and it is one of those things that motivates us to pray. I see that among God’s people.
The third thing I have seen rather lately, and I am really thrilled about this prospect. I recently finished a project as a narrator of a video—I’ll not go into it—but it was about the Moravian revival.
In the midst of studying the befores and afters of the Moravian revival, I saw something that impressed me. In principle, I see that it stands the test of history, and it is this: the Lord is so merciful that no matter how low we get, how desperate we get, how far we fall from His original plan for us, I do not see that there is a generation that has ever gone by that God has not visited His people.
Every generation, there has been some kind of reviving. Sometimes it is what I call a linking revival—that is to say, the Lord links something in the past with something in the future through these stopgap people. Sometimes it is an outright recovery of something that God holds precious and is trying to bring into perfection, namely, the Bride for His Son.
But in every generation, the Lord pours Himself out. Now, I don’t know what the percentage is here, because I’m kind of old and wobbly myself, and I’m not sure how many of you were even around forty years ago. But, to my estimation, that was the last time the Lord really poured out Himself and opened the heavens upon the United States.
What an amazing time it was to be alive. I was just a brand-new Christian, saved in 1964. Then, in the late sixties and through the seventies, God poured out His Spirit and poured out His love upon people. It was such an amazing thing.
Here in California, it was transforming to the whole state. The church leaders today in California basically came out of that time period. People talk about the charismatic movement, and certainly that was part of the expression of God’s outpouring down to the earth back there in the sixties and seventies.
There was a recovery of churches and gatherings who found new grace to stand just for God’s testimony in simplicity and purity. It was an amazing time. It was a Jesus movement. There was the release of Scripture songs. Out of that time, this changed all of our lives.
I am so glad I was there and got the goosebumps. It was amazing to go out on the streets. I put together a little Jesus rock band, which I don’t know what to think about anymore, but we’d get up on this flatbed truck, play songs, and preach in between. Teenagers came to Jesus left and right. It was an amazing thing.
The heavens were opened in a way that they are not right now over the United States. It was an amazing time.
If you ask me what I think the most significant thing was about that time, this is my opinion—twenty-five cents, here it is: I think God sensed the desperation of His precious people who loved Him, who were saved, but who were powerless against the onslaughts of evil that began to befall us in the sixties.
There were many missionaries, many pastors, many church people, and all kinds of groups and churches who loved the Lord, but they were powerless.
In this great moving of God, whether it was among charismatics, among the Jesus people, or among those denominational people who were kick-started during that time, I will tell you what the testimony was more than half the time, at least by my unofficial survey.
When I talked to people about how it all got going for them back in those days of outpouring, most of them said, “You know what? I believed in Jesus when I was a kid, or I believed in Jesus and knew I was saved, but I never knew Jesus loved me until His love poured out upon me.”
I don’t find them talking so much about the gifts of the Spirit that were poured out, but about the love of God that was poured out into their lives.
Imagine being a good Baptist. You love the Lord, you know you are saved, you are reading your Bible, trying your best, keeping your devotions, trying to live holy, witnessing to people—not much fruit, not much happening. Suddenly God comes down and says, “I love you, My son.”
It just liberated denominational people. That’s all I know, because back in those days, that is all I knew. I didn’t know there were crazy people like you guys.
All I knew were denominational people, but I tell you what: the life of the Spirit rose like a lake above all the differences of the denominations. I remember New York in the seventies. It did not make a difference if you were Presbyterian or Lutheran. It was just, “Do you love Jesus?” That was the one question.
If you loved Jesus, everybody was a praise. That was the only requirement. There was a lot of crazy theology, but I’ll leave all that aside. How wonderful.
It has been forty years. I think something is about to happen. I wonder if you feel that in your heart. It is all subjective. You may completely disagree with this. You may not think God keeps a timetable.
But I think God just cannot wait when He sees His people desperate.
How do His people get desperate? What is wrong with us that we get to this place where we need this drought? We get to this place where Elijah had to declare a drought just to make the people desperate. God brought a drought to get people desperate. Why do God’s children have to get to that place?
When you look at the children of Israel, we see the story in the Book of Judges, where you see that great yo-yo of revivals they had through the years. The Book of Judges gives you the reason why the people were so up and down, why they backslid so often.
There were two reasons, sort of two sides of the same coin. They had no king. Without a king, you do not have a leader. Without a king, you have no character. Without a king, you have nothing knowable. Without a king, you are just every man for himself.
That is the other part: everybody did what was right in his own eyes. So they were weak and fractured. Sometimes, even within an individual tribe, families were fighting. No wonder the marauders and all the outside people came in and bothered them for over four hundred years.
Because God saw their condition, He always kept them within the sovereign cycle of His mercy. The people would backslide, fall into oppression, and cry out. As it says in Judges, God would have pity. He would raise up a judge, the people would be revived, and they would be delivered from those particular enemies.
They would have a respite for a while, and then the judge would die. Then they would backslide, go into oppression, cry out, and God would show pity. God would raise up another judge. Oh my goodness, God loves His children. He had to take them around.
Judges is a great sine curve, up and down. Every time God delivered them, they said, “Oh God, we’re going to serve You forever. Forget it—the idols are completely out.” Then some fellow would say, “Oh yeah, I’ve still got a couple idols in my back pocket. Let me try praying to this one and see how it works.” Up and down, up and down over the years.
Well, that is the children of Israel. They were the children of God. We are God’s people. We have a King—the King of kings. We have amazing grace internalized, not just a covenant outside of us that we are striving for. We have this gracious life within us.
How could we ever fall from the normal Christian life?
The normal Christian life. I don’t know. Are you living the normal Christian life? Well, what is that? I will not go into that; I’ll leave that for Watchman Nee. But let me say four things about the normal Christian life.
First, it is simply a life of abiding—abiding in His commandments, abiding in His Word, abiding in Him, and He abiding in you. Man, that is some kind of grace-filled existence.
How about this? “He shall be for you rivers of living water flowing out of you to others.” Rivers of living water. You cannot get any better than that. That is the promise of the Holy Spirit. What a wonderful grace this is to us.
Or how about the encouragement and fellowship of other brothers and sisters that you are one with? You are being one with a family who cares for you, who cares for God’s interests concerning you, who keeps you honest, and who keeps you in the light by fellowship. Oh, these things are precious, just precious to us.
Then we get this privilege. Everybody else in this world has to walk by the flesh because that is all they know—walking by their own lust, walking by their own desires. We get to walk by the Spirit and begin to manifest godly character and fruit in our lives as we walk by the Spirit instead of walking by the flesh.
Oh man, this is such a wonderful, joyful ride. How could we ever slip away from this and need reviving?
I am so glad nobody in this room has slipped away. But now we have to talk about those denominational people. No, no, no.
I do know what it is about us: we do not realize how fallen we really are. God gives us all these gracious things, and especially wraps them all up in His Son and says, “Here, take My Son. He is all you need to live.” Yet we say, “Nah, I think I need a little something more,” and get ourselves into a mess.
How do we slip away? I am going to suggest this very nicely: I think we slip away by inches from that life that we have. I suppose there are some people who get taken by a big con job by the devil and go all out and backslide, but I find most Christians just sort of move away by inches—one little action here, one little thing there.
You remember in the Song of Solomon that wonderful little picture of the king speaking to his beloved bride-to-be. He says to her, “You had better go catch those foxes. They are ruining the vineyard.” I think that is what has happened to our vineyard—these little foxes.
I have recently become aware of this out on a golf course. I have been playing a little bit of golf this year, and they have foxes out there. I had heard about foxes and fox hunting in England. All you rich people like the Lindberghs can go over to England and go fox hunting and all that, but I had never been.
It was interesting to me to be out on the golf course and see some foxes. They were so small, I thought they were squirrels. I thought foxes were kind of big, like some kind of wolf or something. No, they are just little things, but they can get through the hedge. They are really a nuisance and cause all kinds of problems.
It is the foxes that get into our lives and take out that life, draining us.
When you look in the Book of Revelation, you see Jesus speaking to the seven churches. It is not as though He says there has been some great big thing that happened, but rather little, subtle things that have carried people away.
Think about it: the church of Ephesus, the love church. Paul said, “You are so full of love.” Paul loved that church and emphasized the necessity of love. Years later, John, the apostle of love, came to live in Ephesus when Jerusalem was destroyed. You would think, “How could this church ever slip?” Yet it left its first love.
How could you ever leave your first love except by some very small distraction and some very reasonable-sounding religious flesh? Just little bit by little bit, suddenly only Jesus could come with His flashlight and flash into their lives and say, “You have left your first love.”
I think nobody was as surprised as the Ephesians when Jesus said that. They did not even realize it. That is how subtle this whole business is, where the life drains out.
How about the reputable church, Sardis? Well, it had that lively name and lively reputation. “Oh, the church of Sardis—I want to go down there, man. Action going on.” This reputable church—how could it forget the things it had received and heard?
Now, some of you—I am ashamed to say—how many conferences have you had here? Sixty-five? Yeah, sixty-five. Jerry has been at every one of them, and yet he may have lost some of the things he received and heard. How is this possible for Christians, especially when you take notes?
You know, Sardis took notes, and yet they forgot the things they received and the things they heard. What are those little things that caused them? With Sardis, perhaps it was just little laziness and little partial obediences. They just did not quite finish the job.
Just little tiny things, and the next thing you know, they have a reputation, but they are dead. Imagine.
I know we all like to get after the church of Laodicea because we believe it is every other church except ours. But the church in Laodicea—I have to say, I truly believe they thought they were in good standing with Jesus, because their church was working like clockwork.
There are some churches where the preacher preaches, and it is already quarter after twelve and he is still preaching. Not in Laodicea. They lock you up if you cannot finish your sermon by noon. It is too bad; the pot roast is ready, and they go.
Laodicea really thought they were pleasing the Lord. That is why I think their blindness was subtle. It was like Israel’s blindness. They were blinded by their traditions and things.
Christians get blinded in such a way that the Laodiceans had sort of cataracts. They must have believed they could still see, but they were just seeing shadows and forms. I understand when people get the operation, suddenly they can see clearly and see colors and everything. They are amazed at how blind they were.
It just comes on, closes down, narrows your focus, and the next thing you know you are blind, but you think you can still see.
I do not think I need to make too much of a case for the fact that the church has come to the place where it needs reviving, and that we have come to the place where we need reviving.
But there are two, to me, incontrovertible evidences that we are at a place where, if the Lord does not come, there will be even greater desperation. Maybe we need it. I do not know.
The first incontrovertible evidence that we need revival is that we do not think we do.
Most churches are frankly very satisfied with the situation. They see other churches that need reviving. The very fact that we do not see it is evidence that we need it. We have the same blindness of Laodicea intact.
Can you imagine going to the megachurches and saying, “Hey, you need revival”? “What are you, kid?” They are programmed up twenty-four-seven. Your whole life is now in their hands. You are down at the bowling alley at ten o’clock at night. “Wait, what do you mean, revival?” Megas do not need revival. They are the most active group around. They are great.
Then there is emergence—the emergent church, as they call themselves today. These are very clever and very intelligent people, and they are criticizing the church in its present form. Even now, they are redesigning the old wineskins. As they redesign it, no revival comes, no refreshing comes. It is just a dead, revised old wineskin.
Of course, how about our assemblies? Our assembly is sometimes like an old blind horse in front of a milk wagon. The horse is completely blind, but it is so used to going in the rut that it does not need to see anymore.
It just shows up, plods along through a meeting, plods along and goes home, then comes back again. There is so little life. Something is wrong, but we are satisfied with that. Are we satisfied with that? I do not know. What do you think?
I am thinking there are people who have a growing dissatisfaction in their hearts, and they really see that it is time to protest, time to pray, and time to ask God to pour out His Spirit, open the heavens, and come down.
We will be looking at these specific prayers in a little bit, but let us go back to Psalm 80 that we read at the beginning, because this is a prayer for revival. Asaph was one of the harbingers. He is praying to the Shepherd, the Shepherd of Israel.
It is wonderful. Listen: we learn from this psalm. We will look at just a few of its points. We have already read it, so we will not do it again.
First of all, I want you to notice that they have been awakened. Asaph has been awakened to their dreadful condition—the condition of the vineyard, broken down.
Notice verse 8 as an example: “Thou broughtest a vine out of Egypt, and Thou plantedst it.” But now he says in Psalm 80:12, “Why hast Thou broken down its fences, so that all they that pass by the way do pluck it?”
Then Psalm 80:16: “It is burned with fire, it is cut down; they perish at the rebuke of Thy countenance.”
I also think this, as we will see, is a harbinger of a reviving of God: people are awakened. You remember the passage that I read in Isaiah 52: “Awake, awake, Zion. Wake up. Put on strength. Throw off those chains.”
There is a cooperation that we will see is necessary in all reviving. There is something on man’s side, and there is something on God’s side. Of course, you can imagine God does most of it, but He needs people to wake up.
Here is Asaph. He is awakened. He says, “What has happened to the vineyard that God took out of Egypt and planted here in the Promised Land? What has happened? The hedges have come down. The enemy is in there. The boars are chewing it up. It is a terrible situation.”
But then he takes it a second step, and I think this is a little more insight. There is a certain point at which we realize this: all of the decline, all of the allowance of the hedge being broken down and the vineyard being ravaged, is the Lord’s doing.
It is not the enemy or the bad guys. It is not circumstances. It is not the economy. It is the Lord bringing us down.
He says in Psalm 80:4-6:
O Lord God of hosts,
How long wilt Thou be angry against the prayer of Thy people?
Thou hast fed them with the bread of tears,
And given them tears to drink in large measure.
Thou makest us a strife unto our neighbors.
I had to wrestle with the Lord a little bit there. I just finished up a two-year study of the Book of Isaiah, week by week, plodding through like a blind horse. I had to wrestle with a couple of places in Isaiah—well, more than a couple—where He makes it very clear that, when the Lord’s people do not go His way, He waits around for a while, and then He actually operates against the Lord’s people.
He does it until something happens. Do you know what it is that happens? It says the Lord turns and fights against His own people. That sounds really strange, but it is exactly what the Lord does until something happens.
Somebody wakes up and says, “The Lord is doing that to us. This is not going to go away by praying it away. The Lord is doing it to us.”
We see what is going on. The Lord has turned against us. Of course, the wonderful way it is put, both in the Psalms and in Isaiah, is this: in the midst of our desperation, we say, “Where is the Lord Who used to love us so? Where is the Lord?”
The Lord up in heaven says, “Finally, they recognize I exist. Finally, I had to bring them down to desperation before they recognized I exist.” They say, “Where is God?” God is so thankful when people say that.
In Isaiah 52, when God says, “Awake, awake,” it is actually a response to the people in Isaiah 51:9 who say, “God, wake up, wake up. Where are You?”
The amazing thing about God is that He loves people to charge Him with being asleep and away on the job. Why? It is because the people finally acknowledge they need Him. It is something people have a tough time doing when they are so successful and running at the speed of light.
Finally, the people say, “Wake up, God. Wake up, God. Where are You?” God loves that. He says, “Hey, you know what? You need to wake up.” “Oh, I thought You had—” “You need to wake up.”
God always comes back with the last punchline. He wins in every comedy club duel. He has the last say: “You wake up.” But we always start up. This is the harbingers, you see. What is the first thing the harbingers say? “God, wake up, wake up. You seem far away. Why are You making us suffer like this? What are You doing? Have You forgotten us?”
God does not have any security complex. He does not get thrown off by people charging Him with forgetting about them, because He knows when He reveals Himself, then we all melt like wax: “Oh God, what did I say that for? Of course You were not asleep. You were waiting for us to react properly.”
But, of course, the most important thing we can get out of this psalm is that which is repeated and repeated and repeated through the psalm: it is the very presence of God’s face that restores us and revives us.
Notice the way he says it. Psalm 80:3: “O God, restore us, and cause Thy face to shine upon us, and we will be saved.” Psalm 80:7: “O God of hosts, restore us; cause Thy face to shine upon us, and we will be saved.” Psalm 80:19: “O Lord God of hosts, restore us; cause Thy face to shine upon us, and we will be saved.”
Now we need to dig just a little deeper and see what that word restore us means. I think the King James has it rightly where it says, “Turn us again.”
Here is an amazing thing about revival, and an amazing thing about us repenting. The word for repentance in the Old Testament is this word shuv—to turn. Every one of those passages is “turn.”
Here is the truth: we cannot turn unless the Lord turns. We do not even have, in our depravity, the ability to truly repent. We can make some kind of show of religious guilt or something, but to truly repent, rethink, and turn about—that comes from God.
So Asaph rightly says, “Lord, turn us, and then cause Thy face to shine upon us, and we will be saved.” What wonderful revival.
God’s people do not say, “O Lord, we will repent.” They come to the Lord and acknowledge, “Lord, please turn us. Cause us to repent.” If you notice, it is the same word in Psalm 80:14, where they say, “O God of hosts, turn now to us.”
Lord, we need You to turn to us in order that we can turn, in order that Your face can shine upon us, and in order that we can be saved.
Repentance is a gift that comes from God. When we repent, it is not just that we start groveling and get some kind of religious fever where we are trying to make something happen. Repentance is something that is seen in the light.
The light is something mercifully given to us when God shines His face upon us. All we need is to see a flash of that light, and we repent. There is no argument about it.
It is just like Job when he finally saw the Lord. Nobody had to convince him that he needed to repent. He was down—objection withdrawn, contract broken. He had seen. He knew. Then the Lord could restore.
Until we come to that point of desperation, the fact of the matter is, when Jesus said to the seven churches, “Repent,” it was only because Jesus was standing over them with precious light and revelation so that they could see what was wrong and repent.
I am fully convinced that the Ephesians could never have seen they had left their first love unless it was Jesus telling them, in the light of the Word of God and by the Holy Spirit. You know what I am saying? We do not see the obvious until the light shines upon us.
Then we say, “Ah, I see it. It is so clear.” What used to be so murky and indecipherable in the past suddenly becomes clear.
Until that time, we come to the place of such impotence that the world does not fight against us; it just ignores us, because we have nothing to say that they even want to hear.
They get mad if we stand up and ruin one of their parades, but really, the worldly organizations around us are not spending all their time thinking, “What can we do about those Christians? They are bugging us day and night.” They just ignore us.
But there are some harbingers who wake up and say, “Oh Lord, we need Your countenance. We need Your face upon us in order for us to be saved.”
I think we could rightly say that revival is when God’s face is shining upon us. It is when His life is there. That is exactly what reviving is. Somehow, we let that life trickle away in the most subtle kinds of ways.
We do not even realize it until His gracious, merciful presence comes upon us again, and then we realize how far, how far, how far away we have gotten.
I would like to turn to one other Scripture just to end tonight. We are just introducing things. It is in Isaiah again, Isaiah 57.
I would love to see a whole auditorium full of harbingers and people praying with a desperation that is real, asking God to rend the heavens and come down.
But as much as I say that, I also realize there is something we need to talk about here for a few moments at the end and leave for you to think about.
We know this passage in Isaiah 57:14-15:
And it shall be said, Cast ye up, cast ye up, prepare the way,
Take up the stumbling-block out of the way of My people.
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.
The Lord’s reviving work—“Revive Thy work, O Lord, in the midst of the years”—is a very comprehensive thing, but it always starts with individuals.
It always starts when individuals are awakened to their true condition. These people are not contrite and lowly by nature. These people have been broken by the light of God.
The one thing we know is consistent with all real revivals is that there were always some deep dealings of God among His people individually.
Along with blindness, along with leaving first love and all of that, I want to put it another way, because there is a comprehensive problem among God’s people: we are dulled to the sensitivities of the Spirit’s leading.
Whenever there have been true revivings in history, there has been an intense sensitivity to the Spirit’s conviction of sin in people’s lives.
Those things that were casual sins, where people figured, “Eh, they are okay,” suddenly become almost cardinal sins in people’s thoughts—things that have to be dealt with. Especially the area of unforgiveness.
You find when there is a real revival, people cannot simply say, “Well, I forgive them, but I am just not going to fellowship with them.” Oh, how the Spirit deals with that kind of stuff.
That dull attitude of, “I am going to put up with stuff”—no, no, no. You see, the harbingers who are going to be praying have a contrite and lowly spirit. They have a heart that has been broken.
They are able to pray for God’s people not from a position of pride. The reason they are on their knees and desperate is because they see their own situation. As we look at the lives of some intercessors during this weekend, we will see that.
An intercessor is not somebody who is just grabbing hold of God regarding some need. An intercessor is somebody who has been previously dealt with in such a way that he can be a sensitive channel to what the Lord wants.
In this way, we have to confess that there is a lot of sin in our midst, but we have accepted it. It is common practice. Worldliness has been accepted to a certain point. We do not realize how much the world is like leeches, sucking the life out of us.
The world has given us this good world—I think most of you are into the good world—but it just saps our life. We have no energy left. We have spent it all on this and that and the other thing, and then when the Lord comes and speaks, we have no energy left. Something has been sapped out.
The world is a strict synthesis thing. If the world cannot send us down the road to destruction through some evil thing, then it will just put those leeches on us and suck the life out of us.
It sucks the life out of our families. Where we had good family life, now we have no family. The family is going in nine different directions, and there are only eight people in the family. It is crazy how out of control the lives of Christians are.
Do you not think there is some point where the Lord says, “Hold it now. Hold it now. This is gross insensitivity”? Those things that you have been getting away with and saying, “Well, the Lord forgives me for those things”—the Lord wants to deal with them.
So in our lives, if we would indeed be those who come up on the wall, the Lord has to deal with those casual sins.
I have been reading recently about the Welsh revival, that Welsh revival. They had four tenets in the Welsh revival as dear Evan Roberts went from church to church. I will share the first two for now.
The first one is this: if you have any sin that has not been placed under the blood, you must do it immediately. Obey the Holy Spirit.
The second one was this: if there is anything in your life that is questionable, get rid of it. Why do you think it is questionable? Because the Lord is not in it.
Oh, how that would change our lives if we had that kind of sensitivity. I do not think, in this day, we should even try to lay down rules of proper dress and all of that. But I tell you what: when the Lord sensitizes people’s hearts, there is a certain modesty that is part of their lives.
There is also a certain respect, even in conversation, that comes out of a sensitivity to the Holy Spirit.
The Lord’s people are very insensitive, crushing the Holy Spirit, grieving and quenching Him just by our rudeness, just by our carnality, just by our looseness. How can the Lord revive something like that?
So He has to find some people—some people who are contrite and broken—that He can revive. Then, in that reviving, He spreads revival to others, who become convicted as well in their lives.
In the history of revivals, the one thing that is most difficult when you are reading about different revivals is to catch the spirit of what was going on underneath.
They talk about how many people were saved, how long the meetings were, and especially about the instruments used in the revival—the various men or women God used in preaching and all of that. But the one thing they cannot convey is that intensity of spirit.
You had to have been there to catch the intensity of the spirit. If you have been in such a time, whether in a small group, not even a church group, somewhere where the Lord was really dealing in your life, I will tell you there are two feelings you have about that thing as it goes on night after night.
One, you would not dare miss it because of what God is doing. Two, you cannot stand being in it because it is so intensely led by the Holy Spirit.
When we are talking about, and when we should begin to pray, “Lord, revive Thy work,” we are talking about something that has a cost. It will mean brokenness and contrition—not self-brokenness, but somebody who has really seen his condition before a holy God.
The wonderful thing about revival is that it restores a sense of holiness to God’s people. That gets lost in the shuffle. In the midst of grace, in the midst of love, in the midst even of righteousness, holiness gets lost.
But when God shines His face and saves His people, He shines with holiness, and His people are healed.
Dear brothers and sisters, here is the good news. There are people now who are desperate, and they are praying. They have learned some of the principles of intercessory praying.
Next time, I would like to share a little bit on revival praying. They have caught hold of something, and they are laying hold of the Lord, believing that the time of His outpouring is near.
I do not know if you believe that, so I am just going to ask you to consider that in your heart. Lord, what time is it among us? Have we gotten desperate enough? Are we down to the place where we cannot keep lying to ourselves that we are okay? Do we actually see our situation?
You know what? I would be happy if the Lord just revived some individual lives here this weekend. That would be a good start.
O Lord, I have heard Thy report, and I am afraid.
O Lord, revive Thy work in the midst of the years;
In the midst of the years make it known;
And in wrath remember mercy.
We are just going to ask to have a few moments for prayer. A few people, please, if you would take these things back to the Lord, however you feel impressed to pray. Then our brother will come up with announcements after there has been some praying.