Two verses in the book of Acts. One we have read before: Acts 3. Peter is speaking to the Jews in Jerusalem of the new way into life, even life eternal—the door of repentance and faith.
Therefore repent and return,
so that your sins may be wiped away,
in order that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord;
and that He may send Jesus, the Christ appointed for you.
We are so thankful that revival comes as we repent, believe, and come to the Lord Jesus. There is life for those who do so.
In Acts 11, Peter recounted the strange experience he had in the house of Cornelius, the Gentile. He shared with the saints back in Jerusalem, who thought it incredible that the Spirit had fallen in that place. After giving a thorough explanation, it says in Acts 11:18:
And when they heard this report, they quieted down and glorified God, saying, “Well then, God has granted to the Gentiles also the repentance that leads to life.”
I love that little phrase: the repentance that leads to life—or, literally, the repentance unto life.
Now let us go back to the Old Testament and read just two Scriptures. Habakkuk is our theme thought here.
Habakkuk was a prophet upon the walls—a remembrancer, a harbinger. By the way, I understand some people do not understand what those words mean. I thought some might stumble on “remembrancer,” but “harbinger,” I thought we all knew.
Just for the sake of clarity, a harbinger simply means a forerunner, a sign of something about to take place. On the East Coast, we say that when the robin redbreast comes, it is the harbinger of spring. When we see the robins get back to New York, we say, “Hey, springtime is here.” That is what a harbinger is.
What I have been trying to say is that when you start to see people up on the wall praying for revival, you know revival is coming soon. The harbingers of revival are those prayers, those remembrancers—those people desperate for the Lord’s life and reality to be poured out upon the earth.
So now we come to Habakkuk 3:2:
O Lord, I have heard the report about You, and I fear.
O Lord, revive Thy work in the midst of the years.
In the midst of the years make it known;
in wrath remember mercy.
Then we will simply read Psalm 126, one of those wonderful Songs of Ascents. Because the saints would climb up to Jerusalem, they sang these various songs.
When the Lord brought back the captive ones of Zion,
we were like those who dream.
Then our mouth was filled with laughter,
and our tongue with joyful shouting;
then they said among the nations,
“The Lord has done great things for them.”
The Lord has done great things for us;
we are glad.Restore our captivity, O Lord,
as the streams in the South.
Those who sow in tears shall reap with joyful shouting.
He who goes to and fro weeping, carrying his bag of seed,
shall indeed come again with a shout of joy,
bringing his sheaves with him.
O Lord, we thank You that You have touched us this evening as we gathered around Your table. As we remembered You, our hearts went back and rejoiced. As our brothers said, it is such a great privilege to come together by free will before the table of the King of kings. We are glad.
Now, Lord, we ask that You be with us and give us a listening ear and an understanding heart to respond to You. We realize that if we repent and respond to You, there is sure life—life abundant. You said that You came to give us abundant life.
So we cast aside the works of the devil, who is here to steal, kill, and destroy. Take rather the full life that is ours in Christ Jesus, even tonight. Oh, help us by the Holy Spirit truly to be those awakened to that proper kind of dissatisfaction with anything less than all of Christ and all in Christ.
Lord, we pray that You help us as we share these final thoughts together this evening. In Jesus’ precious name, we pray. Amen.
I would just like to share this evening a final thought: this little phrase, “in the midst of the years.” “Revive Thy work in the midst of the years. In the midst of the years make it known,” or, as one translation says so well, “In the midst of the years, reveal it.”
It is as if a whole new revelation of that work suddenly comes to the fore. Only a sovereign God can give life to something in the midst of the years and revive it.
Back in the old days, when we had old cars that you actually had to tune up—not just put in computer parts—it was quite a process. For those who ever tried to do that, changing plugs, adjusting the carburetor, and all that kind of stuff, only God can do it while the engine is running.
Every spark plug changed, the carburetor cleaned, the filters changed, and still the engine is running. Only God, a sovereign God, could do such a thing.
God takes our lives. We come to Christ and are filled with life, but there is a corrupting certainty in our lives because of our fallen nature. We cannot hang on to things long before this death process of our self-life begins to take hold. But God can come and revive us in the midst of the years by His wonderful mercy upon us.
The same is true with the church. Gathered together with such joy at the beginning, but with time, that same corrupting process of things we do not even quite understand—flesh, willfulness, and disobedience—brings dearth to the church life. But the Lord says He can revive this work in the midst of the years.
Believe it or not, countries, empires, and kingdoms only have a certain lifespan. There is no country upon this earth that lasts forever. Even those empires that started in great life and moral character soon begin to corrupt, decay, fall down, and decline.
But can you believe that the Lord can even revive a city, a country, and stop that erosion if God’s people call upon His name?
Throughout the revivals of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and even twentieth centuries, 2 Chronicles 7:14 has been a most common covenant that people lay hold of. Do you believe that? Do you believe 2 Chronicles 7:14?
If My people, which are called by My name, will pray,
and seek My face,
and turn from their wicked ways,
then I will hear from heaven,
I will forgive their sins,
and I will heal their land.
Perhaps you think that just applies to Israel, and of course that is the context of it. But there have been countries that have known wonderful reviving because people have followed along that line, taken it seriously, and been willing to deal with the sins in their own lives.
When the Lord looks down from heaven and sees the plight of His children, and sees them calling out and asking for mercy, He shows mercy. There is only so much we can do. We are the salt and the light of the earth, but there is a corrupting process that goes on no matter how faithful Christians are.
But Christians have a right to call on the Lord God, and the Lord shows mercy on a country. He stops the corrosion and the corruption that are so obvious.
We have a situation in our nation that I think we have to recognize truly as decline. I am sorry that the young people are growing up in a time of decline, because the older ones grew up in a time when we were still going up. It is no longer the case.
America only has a shelf life of so many years. But the Lord can stop the corrosion and the corruption if there are those who care to pray. We see this wonderful promise before us for us to believe and to take hold of.
Now, I want us to look at Psalm 126 tonight as an example of what it means to be revived in the midst of the years. In that Psalm there is a clear division into two parts: verses 1 through 3 are the first part; verses 4 through 6 are the second part.
If you could see it in the original Hebrew, you would see that at the beginning of both sections there is a double turning. In each case, the word shuv, which is the word “repent” or “turn,” is used at the beginning of verse 1 and at the beginning of verse 4. It speaks about a double turning in our lives.
We are going to look at that because it is that midst of the years, where the second turning is necessary, on which we want to focus our attention.
First, we see in the first three verses the amazing turning. When God comes down in His mercy and grants revival—or, in the case of the Jews, delivers them from captivity—what a mercy it is to be delivered and to come back to the promised land.
They said, “When that happened, we were like those who dream.” Oh, praise God, what a wonderful time.
But then we come to the midst of the years, and we find at the beginning of verse 4 a strange captivity out of captivity—indeed, an inner captivity. They are no longer in Babylon, but something is wrong.
Deliverance from that captivity necessitates repentance, taking up the cross, and bearing obedience with seed that would produce fruitfulness for the purpose of God. We see this simple division, and we will make two basic applications: first, in our individual lives; and second, in the life of the church.
Do you remember when the Lord set you free from captivity? I know it is a disadvantage for those who get saved young, because the worst thing you did was steal your sister’s toothbrush and then beat her on the head when she told your mama.
But for an old villain like me, when I got saved at twenty, there was a freeing from Babylon. The joke of jokes is that I grew up in Babylon. There is a town named Babylon on Long Island. Of all the places I grew up, why would the Lord have me grow up in Babylon?
The Quakers developed Long Island and settled there, and they did not like that town at all. So I was not born in Jericho or Bethpage. No, I was born in Babylon. But at twenty years old, the Lord set me free from Babylon.
Oh man, I had been in captivity and in bondage to all kinds of sins. All I can remember is what a wonderful time I had. It was wonderful.
The moment I got saved, I was on my knees at twenty years old, singing a song. I had no idea it had the word “repent” in it, because all I knew of the song was what I had heard the choir singing at church:
Turn your eyes upon Jesus.
I turned my eyes. That is repentance. And I was set free.
I knew it. Even my wife knew it. She did not like it. I mean, immediately there was a great change in my life. I stopped smoking two packs of cigarettes and went to inhaling a pipe.
That is true. I cut my curse words in half. I was a holy man right from the moment I got saved.
Well, I will tell you one thing: I got truly saved. I did. I felt like I was in a dream. I felt the love of Jesus every time I closed my eyes; it made me weep. I could feel the tingling on my arms when I asked Him to come and fill me with the Spirit. It was real. I was dreaming. Do not wake me up.
I was like those who laugh. I was a laugher. I just enjoyed it so much. In our particular church, we had the corniest preacher there had ever been. He told the corniest jokes. Even his wife had to really work up a laugh.
Forget it. I was laughing at every one of his jokes before the punch line came. I was full of joy, just like Psalm 126 says:
When the Lord brought back the captive ones of Zion,
we were like those who dream;
our mouth was filled with laughter,
and our tongue with joyful shouting.
I joined the choir and became a major praiser—a laugher, a praiser, an enjoyer, a dreamer. That is the way it should be when we are saved. Praise God, we have been set free.
Some of you young people do not realize the freedom you came into right away, but I hope you realize it now. It is a wonderful and joyful thing to belong to God.
The overwhelming thing, which could not be explained and which I could not quite put my finger on then, I would explain this way now, forty-five years down the road: in the midst of the laughing, dreaming, joy, and praising was an awareness of God so big and me so small.
There is something cradling about seeing God so big. That is what I saw. I was reading a book called God Unlimited, and suddenly I realized that Jesus was huge. I had thought He was just a man.
That is how I got saved. I closed that book, God Unlimited, got down on my knees, sang “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus,” and got up out of Babylon. Praise God, I was rejoicing in that.
But inevitably, as you realize, there comes this “in the midst of the years.” You begin to realize, “Wow, I have been saved. I love Jesus, but I have to be honest with You: there is some kind of inner captivity still in my life.”
I have come out of Babylon, but Babylon has not come out of me. I have self and things that short-circuit my relationship to the Lord—some sins unconfessed and all kinds of things.
The more serious you are about the Lord, the more obvious is this dry patch right in the middle, in the midst of the years. It seems strange, because it was not as though my desire to know the Lord and serve the Lord had lessened. In fact, it intensified.
I started doing man-made, self-initiated things to try to be a servant of God in the midst of the years. But despite it all, there was something I knew in my heart of hearts: there was this inner captivity. I just could not release it.
Of course, I had to come to realize what was going on. The Lord brings us into the midst of the years because, up to that point, although I had witnessed to some people and they had gotten saved, relatively speaking I was not a seed-sower, bearing fruit as a responsible son in the Father’s industry and purpose.
I was just a free-floating person on social security from Jesus—a typical Christian welfare beggar. I said, “I am nothing, Jesus. You are everything, and I never plan to be anything, so You had better take care of me from now on.” Just on social security. Unemployed.
So I went dry, because the Lord is not quite satisfied with that lifestyle. It is just a wasted, wasted life. He is going to get something out of us. He puts the squeeze on and begins to show us things in our lives.
Turn to Psalm 119. I decided it would be good to show David as he was getting squeezed by the Lord and what he was seeing in his dry spells. We could do a whole study of David in his dry moments, but I will use three verses from Psalm 119 where he asks the Lord to revive him.
Psalm 119:37 is the first verse:
Turn away my eyes from looking at vanity,
and revive me in Thy way.
David was a lover of God. He had a heart for God and the whole thing, but he also could turn away and look at vanity—emptiness, vain things. He became an adulterer and a murderer for nothing, as vanity.
Because of vanity, his son rebelled against him and split the kingdom. Because of vanity, he took a census and brought down the wrath of God upon Israel. Vanity is corrupting; it is killing. David knew it.
But David turned and repented: “Oh Lord, take my eyes away from vanity. Revive me in Your ways. I see my ways are vanity, and I need Your ways. Lord, help me walk in Your ways.”
The Bible says wonderfully in Acts that David served the purpose of God in his generation because he took the second step and allowed the Lord to turn him in a second repentance. It brought him into fruitfulness, and he served the purpose of God in his generation.
Or take Psalm 119:107. This is in the context of, “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.” Until I was afflicted, I went astray. But verse 107 says:
I am exceedingly afflicted;
revive me, O Lord, according to Thy word.
David found that without that lamp lighting his way, he got into trouble. Sometimes it takes people just plain old getting into trouble before they come back to the Lord. “Oh, revive me, Lord,” they say, after they have gotten themselves into trouble by foolishness, walking in their own way.
David said, “Lord, I know the key to revival is Your word. Revive me according to Your word, because I am stuck and cannot get out of this trouble.” It is amazing what the Lord does when somebody gets serious about His word and follows it.
There is also revival in spiritual battle. David is being attacked by his enemies, and he says, “Oh Lord, revive me. Revive me.” There is spiritual warfare out there.
I am glad whenever I see somebody who has become privy to it. There are many Christians who do not really believe there is a very active devil or real spiritual conflict. They think the only conflicts are circumstantial problems. They have no idea that they are being crossed up at every corner, especially when they decide to serve God.
But David knew that. He said, “Oh, revive me, Lord. I need Your life to get through this spiritual conflict.” What a wonderful turning.
What do you do in the midst of the years? After the joy, dreaming, and laughter are over, and now you are getting dry as the desert, we go back to Psalm 126:4:
Restore our captivity, O Lord,
as the streams in the South.
It actually says, “Turn our turning, O Lord, as the streams in the South.” Now, you know as a serious Christian that the way forward for your life, if it is to be meaningful, involves the cross. It involves sacrifice. It involves consecration.
It is interesting that even some young people who have grown up in Christian households but have not accepted Christ understand that the cost of coming to Christ is more than just accepting Him as a Saviour. They have to give their whole lives.
Watchman Nee realized that it was not enough just to get saved. If he was going to get saved, he was going to have to give his whole life to serve the Lord. That is what he wrestled with when he came and gave his life to the Lord. He did not just come to get saved; he came to get saved and to put on the harness, to be the Lord’s servant. He meant it, and he never looked back.
Oh, how we need to come to that point of realizing there is this whole second aspect in our life where the Lord is trying to capture us. The fact of the matter is, in the midst of the years, you cannot avoid captivity, but you can choose your captor.
You will be captivated by something in the world. If it is not money, it is status. If it is not status, it is mobility. If it is not mobility, it is foolishness, perks, security, or whatever it is. There is a captor waiting for you unless you come to Jesus and say, “Make me a captive, Lord, and then I will be free.”
There comes a place where a person has to say, “Lord, I am a captive of Yours. I will only let You be my Lord.” Then the Lord can really do things in our life.
How long does this repentance take? It is as quick as a flash flood in the desert.
“Restore our captivity, O Lord, as the streams in the South.” In the south of Israel, there are dry wadi beds, dry and solid. They look like the salt desert out here in Utah or California. But suddenly rain comes, and in these dry riverbeds where there is not even a sign of life, a stream shows up.
Ten minutes after the rain starts trickling down, little flowers begin to pop up out of the ground. It is an actual miracle of life to see the desert when the water comes through.
What He is saying is, “Turn our turnings. Turn me so that I might repent, and then those streams of water come right back in.” Why? Because you are already a Christian. It does not take ten years to get back on the spot with the Lord. It takes a nanosecond.
“Oh Lord, turn me,” because you cannot turn yourself. “Lord, turn me like the streams in the South,” and boom, the water is back and you are revived.
Usually, in that coming back from a wasted, vain, and trouble-filled life, there is one issue that the Lord wants from your life—something you have to give up to Him. Of course, in all our lives there are at least twelve issues, but He takes one at a time. He likes playing dominoes. You hit that one, and the others begin going, bum, bum, bum, bum.
If you know you are dry and in the desert, there is no water. You are supposed to be happy, but instead you feel unfulfilled. Cry out to God: “Oh God, I am dry as a bone, spiritually dry. Oh Lord, if You do not turn me, I will not be turned. If You turn me in a second, I will get a flash flood of rivers of living water. Here is the issue. I give it to You, Lord.”
The term I like because it is so picturesque is this: the Lord only wants absolute surrender.
Did you not know that from the start? Why have you been clowning around as an unemployed, useless Christian? Absolute surrender.
D. L. Moody was challenged in his young Christian life that the world has yet to see what the Lord can do through a person totally yielded to Him. Absolute surrender.
In the end, you have greater freedom when you put that yoke on you, learn of Him, and find rest for your soul. You find a greater liberty than back in the hoo-ha days when you were laughing, joking around, and so happy you had just gotten saved.
When you come to the Lord in the midst of your years, you say, “Okay, Lord, that has had it. I am tired of roaming.” What is that old gospel hymn?
I’ve wandered far away from God,
now I’m coming home.
Oh, how God weeps when He sees His children coming home, and the parents do too. Children roam out there thinking they are getting away with things, but they are just getting themselves into trouble. One day they say, “Lord, I am coming home.”
He puts that bridle on you, begins to teach you, and you find out what your life was really meant to be: a seed-sower.
Oswald Chambers said, “Outside of redemption, life is a tragedy.” He was writing during the First World War, when all the Pollyanna ideas of idealism—“the world is getting better and better”—were being blown to a crisp by the devastation of war.
Life is a tragedy outside of redemption. When we come back to the Lord, a certain seriousness comes into our lives. We realize, “I have the privilege of going into this tragic life, where people are dying, afraid, and blind, and I can sow precious seed with weeping—precious seed in the face of rejection.”
And doubtless, in the end, you come with shouts of joy when you bring somebody back out of tragedy into redemption. There are only two places to live: in the world or in Christ; in tragedy or in redemption.
Young people, when you are young, I know you do not believe this world is a tragic place. You have to dream for a while longer about this world being a better place. But outside of Christ, there is a corrupting principle going on right now. Things are getting darker and darker.
There you are with a serious call of God upon your life. Every Christian has a serious call: holiness in your life and the bearing of precious seed. You have had it in the bag since the moment you were saved, but you have not scattered it. You hid it, zipped up the bag when somebody came around, lest your Christian confession would turn somebody off.
Forget all of that. You may turn off some people, but they may come back to you two years later and thank you with tears in their eyes because you told them the truth in the midst of this tragic life. The Lord wants our lives to count.
If this Scripture applies to the individual, it applies even more to the church. The Lord restored the captivity of Zion—Zion, the corporate people of God; Zion, the dwelling place of God.
Can you believe that Zion turned their backs on God, and so God turned them into Babylon? Then, at the right time, God turned them back around and said, “Come on back.” When the Lord turned their turning, they were like dreamers, because they knew they deserved to live and rot in Babylon, but the Lord remembered them and had mercy.
Even the Babylonians—the Persians by then—said, “God is really doing something big with these children of Israel.” It is amazing when the Lord revives the church and even the world looks and says, “Whoa, there is something going on there.”
It is a wonderful thing to see ten or fifteen thousand young people go into an auditorium and worship God from seven o’clock at night to four in the morning, and then come out with a hundred or two hundred saved. They never knew people could love God so much. That touches people.
Back in the sixties and seventies, when the Lord began putting together some of these elements where we now meet in various assemblies, the Lord raised the level of Grace Lake so high that when we came together, it was like a dream.
You did not want to miss the meetings because you did not know what on earth was going to happen. Somebody might get saved. There might be a miracle. Somebody might get healed. You had no idea, but you were not going to miss it.
We were like those who dream. We were laughing. The joy of the Lord was our strength. We shared with one another. The Lord’s life was there. We said, “The Lord is doing a great thing,” and you could sense it. Wonderful.
With that lake of grace risen above the smallness of our differences, denominations, and everything else, all we saw was Jesus. We came together and began to meet as a church. Oh, I love those wonderful grace days.
When the Lord starts a new place, it is always so full of grace. One hundred percent grace—not even one percent human faithfulness. When God brings things together, there is so much grace on that thing.
I am not talking about men putting together a demographic chart and deciding, “We are going to plant a church over here next Thursday.” I am talking about something God brings together.
When God gathers things together, there is so much grace. Brothers come together with no homework done, no Bible study prepared, and somebody says, “Maybe I will share something.” They share something full of life, and somebody gets saved. It is all wacky, disorganized, and wonderful—full of joy.
But there is the midst of the years for assembly life. You know the prognosis. Fleshly conflict has a way of ruining our dream time. The lake of grace starts drying up. Leaders get deadlocked out of sheer stubbornness.
Neither group A nor group B is in the Lord. They are just stubborn. They are not going to give way even when they know they are wrong. It becomes like a deadlock.
The Lord eventually has to show us something. In the beginning, when He is pouring out grace, we say, “Isn’t this wonderful? Aren’t God’s people wonderful? We can love one another. How blessed it is to dwell together in unity.” We get up and do a little Jewish dance, and everybody is having a wonderful time.
But then we come to the midst of the years, and we realize: “Why is our worship the same all the time? I thought we had more life than this. I thought this was Jesus’ life. How come those prophecies always say the same thing? How come the same people pray the same things?”
We are praying with less and less faith and more and more talk. We are thankful for brothers so-and-so who are teaching, but, boy, I sure wish they would get something from the Lord.
What is the problem? Is it the brothers’ problem? No, it is your problem and the brothers’ problem. It is that we do not know how to live by the life of Christ. We are living out of our own best religious garments and efforts. The Lord will not let us get away with that for too long.
So it seems as if the life drains out. When you come to the midst of the years, a time like that is a crucial, crucial, crucial time.
Most Christians leave at that point. Why? Because they have never understood that even in church life the church has to go the way of the cross. They never heard it. They heard that the church gets better and better, more prosperous, with greater blessings and greater things.
Then when the church hits a tough time, they think, “God left this place,” and so they leave too. They spend the rest of their lives chasing the next move of God, just as they used to chase the waves for a good surf.
“Where is the new beginning? Where can I go and just get in there and be sloppy agape, pray, and not be disciplined?” They run around for the rest of their lives chasing after the next move of God, and it becomes vanity of vanities.
Leaders get defensive, things block up, and that makes it even rougher. Or they die in the process and get discouraged. Some elders think they can de-elderize themselves, but you cannot.
When times get low, people start to hoard the seed. Even though the seed supplies are going down, they think the best thing to do is hoard the seed so that at least they can eat the seed if they cannot plant it.
Somewhere in there, if we do not acknowledge our captivity, then we are not hearing the Spirit speaking to the church.
How long does it take to revive the church in the midst of the years? As quickly as a flash flood can come to the desert.
Again, there is usually an issue. In the seven churches in Revelation, each church had a particular issue. It probably was not their only issue, but it was their life-blocker that needed a repentance unto life.
When the Lord wants to revive the church in the midst of the years, He points to an issue: a restoration of forgiveness, a repentance, whatever it may be.
The Lord waits to see who will be the first on their knees. The first on their knees are those who hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches. The rest say, “There is no need for revival here.”
If that group never confesses the fact that they need to get on their knees and ask the Lord, “Lord, we want life more than we want self-respectability. We want life more than we want to be right,” then what happens?
I have seen groups get down to the nub—half a dozen people. Now they are all overcomers. That is the only reason they are still there: they do not need anybody to shepherd them or care for them. They can make it on their own. They know the Lord. Praise God, that is wonderful—but that is not the church.
The church has little children, young men, and fathers. The church has weak people and new converts. The church is various. If we lose all those people, do you not think it is time for us to say, “I think, Lord, there is an issue in the midst of the years”?
When the Lord reveals it, be first on your knees, acknowledging, “We are captives, Lord, and only You can turn us. We have headed the ship into dry ground, and now we are stuck. Only You can raise the water again.”
Why would the Lord even bother reviving us in the midst of the years? When an assembly starts getting on the skids, gets down to where it is ineffective, and nobody even knows it exists anymore, why does the Lord not just chuck it and say, “Let’s go with Plan B and start another group”?
There is a reason. That group, even in abysmal shape, tottering on the border of nonexistence, has precious seed.
Your children are your seed.
God wants you to sow them into the next generation. That is why He is keeping you together. If you could just turn and ask for the life of God, the rivers would flow.
Then come to that place where we give ourselves as a fellowship, poured out for others. What a wonderful offering that is. Here we are, a group no longer for ourselves. Forget about ourselves. What do we need, a bigger building or something? Forget it.
What we need to do is be seed. We have a purpose. We have a responsibility. We have been given something precious here. Now let us sow the seed.
If the Lord can revive us in the midst of the years, as He wants to do, and cause the waters of life to flow through us, it is all by His mercy. Nobody can take credit for this kind of thing.
Then we can sow the seed. That seed can go out. We can sow the seed of our own young ones and those in whom we have invested. We sow them with tears because they go out from us sometimes. But we come back with rejoicing.
There is nothing better than seeing your son or daughter serving the Lord. There is a reward in that. It is worth the repentance, worth the crying, and, in the end, worth the rejoicing, because the Bride has come one step closer with each generation when that seed gets sown.
I will share for a couple of minutes about young Count Zinzendorf. In the 1520s, Luther started the Reformation. With Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, the Anabaptists, and all the rest, there was a period from the 1500s into the 1600s that knew the Reformation.
The Reformation spoke of justification by faith and began to talk about the word of God. It came alive. It was wonderful. But the problem with the Reformation movement was that it was new truth in the old wineskin. They were still meeting much as the Roman Catholics had met.
After about a hundred years, the life began to go out of it. God had a wonderful reviving in Germany among the Lutherans. It was called the Pietists.
The Pietists were Lutherans who had enough of merely orthodox doctrine. They wanted heartfelt religion. They met from house to house, studied their Bibles every day, learned Greek and Hebrew, and especially prayed for heartfelt life with Christ.
They were the mystics from whom we get so many wonderful hymns that we sing. These were the Pietists, and revival started.
In 1700, young Zinzendorf, a young count, was born. Six months after he was born, his mother died, and he was sent to his grandmother’s house, Catharina von Gersdorf, a famous baroness with a great deal of money who was a Pietist.
She had learned the Bible in Greek and Hebrew and read it every day. The great Pietist leaders of the day, Spener and Francke, came to her house almost every week. They had meetings there, and little Zinzendorf, three or four years old, heard about Jesus: “Jesus loves you. You need to love Jesus.”
Zinzendorf grew up as a little boy with a heart this big for Jesus. When he was sixteen, he was already in a Pietistic school. They gave him a hard time because he was a count. They beat on him, said he was proud, and humbled him.
But he formed a secret society with a couple of other count-to-be friends: the Order of the Mustard Seed. They carried the motto:
His wounds, our healing.
When he got out of college, the Lord met him as he looked at a picture of Jesus. Under the picture, which showed Jesus bleeding on the cross, it said:
This I have done for you.
What have you done for Me?
That was when young Zinzendorf, eighteen years old and just out of college, went from part A to part B. He gave his life, saying, in effect, “I am purposefully sacrificing my life in order that others might be saved.”
He married when he was twenty-one, received his inheritance, obtained an estate, built a house there, and went to work in Dresden. Then a man showed up and said, “I come from Czechoslovakia. We have been on the run for hundreds of years. I have eleven families, and we need shelter. Could you open your property so that we could move there?”
Zinzendorf’s heart said, “Sure.” Eleven families came from Czechoslovakia and set up at Herrnhut, which means “the Lord’s Watchtower,” because they believed in prayer.
Between 1722 and 1727, three hundred people came. They were the offscourings and persecuted people from all over Europe. They came to Herrnhut and lived on his property. They built a little town there.
What happened in the process was terrible. There is nothing like saints getting together all in the flesh. They had Lutherans, Lutheran Pietists, Anabaptists, Waldensians, United Brethren, Moravian Brethren, Roman Catholics—every form and shape of weirdness—and they were all fighting with each other.
Finally, Zinzendorf was forced to make some rules. They came up with forty-two rules just so they could exist without killing each other. One of them was, “I do not allow any fighting over doctrine.” They set up elders and other rules.
The people joined hands and covenanted to live by the rules. They found a precious oneness in one accord.
Little did Zinzendorf know what was going to happen. In the summer of 1727, he went to Poland to visit another count to whom he was related. While he was there, he found the writings of John Comenius.
Comenius was the last bishop of the Moravian Brethren before the movement died and went underground about one hundred years earlier. He had written almost exactly forty-two articles about how to live together.
But what really gripped Zinzendorf was Comenius’ account of the last persecution. The Moravian Brethren had been persecuted out of Poland. Their city was burned, their library and books were burned, people were killed, and they fled into the mountains.
There, Comenius prayed, “Lord, the whole thing has fallen into death. Would You preserve a seed for the future?”
When Zinzendorf read that, he fell down and cried because he realized that on his very property was this preserved seed, this remnant that had been preserved since 1457 up to that day in 1727.
He got back to Herrnhut, gathered the saints together, and asked forgiveness of all of them for not realizing what God was doing. He asked forgiveness for not loving them as he should.
As he asked forgiveness, got on his knees, and began washing the feet of these people, they melted before the Lord. The Holy Spirit came down and baptized them into one body of Christ.
They knew a joy, a unity, and a life that lasted for one hundred years. So much happened in that life through that one single man.
The people began to meet every morning and every night. They sang and sang. They had eight hundred songs, and within a few years they had memorized six, seven, or eight verses of all eight hundred songs. They studied the Bible day and night, lived together, helped each other, worked together, and prayed together. It was an amazing thing.
A month after the revival of August 13, 1727—the day they said they became Christ’s body—they decided they had to pray seriously. Twenty-four men and twelve women covenanted together to pray every hour of the day.
For twenty-four hours a day, they had two people praying every hour. That lasted one hundred years. After a while, there were more than two people praying at a time, but for one hundred years they prayed.
They sent out missionaries. “Lord, what should we do?” The Lord said, “Send out your best.” They sent out their best young people.
They had a group of six hundred by 1742, and by then they had sent out seventy as missionaries—their best young people. They sent out their seed, and they cried all the way, but they prayed for them every day.
The Moravians were effective in their ministry. They said, “Find me the place where nobody knows Christ, the worst possible place to go. That is where we want to go.”
Going to Georgia, they met John Wesley on the boat, and that is how John Wesley got saved. We went from revival to recovery, to another revival—the Great Awakening in England in the eighteenth century—to another recovery through John Wesley and the holiness teachers.
All it was was one young boy who loved the Lord with all his heart, mind, soul, and strength. Look what he did, about twenty-seven years old.
In the end, he and his wife had twelve children and lost nine of them because they were living in a hard situation. He gave up his mansion. At the end of his life, he was bankrupt. He gave all the millions he had as a count for the people of God. He died a happy man. He gave all.
The world was flung wide with Moravians. The Lord wants seed and purpose. There is a greater reason for being together than just to be together.
Oh, that we can find it and be seed, sowing seed wherever we go. But it starts with you, halfway home, in the midst of the years. What are you going to do for the rest of your life?
It starts with the assembly in the midst of the years. What are you going to do with the rest of your life?
I want to have a prayer, just asking the Lord to turn our turning and to bring His life.
I am so happy to be with you because there is something wonderful, twofold, about you. I find many brothers and sisters here who truly have a brokenness and a desire to seek the Lord. You do not find that in many places, I must say in all honesty.
Many of you seem sincerely to be pursuing Jesus and to be truly broken people. I also see—and I have not hidden it from you; perhaps I should be more subtle about it—that I happen to believe your younger generation is the cat’s pajamas.
That is an old-fashioned way of saying, “the greatest”—certainly better than Lake Wobegon’s “better than average.” But they need to be given away. They need to give themselves away, and they need to be given away.
The Lord can do the next step in His reviving and recovery work if we realize what our life is all about.
Oh Lord, I come to You and say, “Lord, I have heard the report about You and am afraid. O Lord, revive Thy work in the midst of the years. In the midst of the years, make it known.”
Let there be such a revelation and refreshing of the Lord as to recover our assemblies and recover our children. Lord, would You even remember those dear children of ours who have gone far away from God, and bring them back home for their purpose in life?
Oh Lord, do not let them stray too long. We know You are coming back soon. Lord, we pray for quality of life that is found under the yoke of Jesus, and a second turning.
Let it be a turning with the cross, a turning with tears, and a turning with deeper joy and freedom than ever known before, because finally there is a purpose and a reason to live.
Oh God, do shed from us the lesser things. Help us come and step up into the latter glory, which is greater than the former.
Oh, how we thank You for Your grace falling upon us in salvation and as You have gathered us together in various assemblies. But now we pray for Your glory, and we know that has cost to it.
Oh Lord, show us the issue, that we might turn as You turn us and be all You want us to be.
I thank You for these dear saints, beloved by You. I know You remember even the prayers of their mothers and fathers and those who enabled them to be here today by grace.
Oh Lord, remember what You have done here. Surely, You will not forget. Do a work that will be marvelous in our eyes, that which only You can do in the midst of the years.
For Jesus’ sake, we pray. Amen.