WHAT IS REVIVAL?

WHAT IS REVIVAL?

                We had a guest speaker at our church last night. He is one of the general overseers of the Church of God and he came to speak at our homecoming. We were celebrating 70 years as a local church here in Clinton Tennessee which is the same amount of time that Israel has been in their land. There is a feeling in the air that something is about to happen. Our nation has never been more vulnerable than it is right now. America teeters on a narrow fulcrum point between judgment and repentance. What will it be?

                Churches across America should been repenting and crying out for a revival of faith and godliness and a turning of the tide in our land. (And there are a few who are doing just that.) But unfortunately most Christians seem to have no idea concerning our situation. Many are playing church as usual even as our fate hangs in the balances.

                In many ways, America sits as a queen who has need of nothing. Like the nation of Judah our land has been filled with idols and witchcraft, adultery and fornication and incense to foreign gods even as our children are offered up to Moloch as we celebrate the return of Baal. We are steadily losing our constitutional freedoms as the Bible and prayer and the defenders of the faith are shut down in the various forms of media.

                A prophetess named Huldah prophesied over Judah saying that God was going to bring evil upon the land, even all the words written in the book and so the King of Judah repented and God said to the king; “Because your heart was tender and you humbled yourself before the Lord when you heard what I spoke and against its inhabitants that they should become a desolation and a curse and you have torn your clothes and wept before Me. I truly have heard you”, declares the Lord. “Therefore, behold, I will gather you to your fathers and you shall be gathered to your grave in peace, neither shall your eyes see all the evil which I will bring on this place.”2 Kings 22:19, 20.

                 So King Josiah and some of the people repented, but unfortunately for Judah, it was too little too late. And when you look at what Josiah did to try to restore Judah to the Lord it is amazing how far they had fallen. 2Kings 23 shows them removing the vessels of Baal from the temple of all places. They removed the male prostitutes and destroyed the places where their sons and daughters were made to pass through the fires of Molech. He removed the mediums and the spiritists and the teraphim and the idols and the many abominations in the land of Judah and Israel.

                Imagine what a confrontation would occur in America if we removed all of the abominations that now fill our land. Even a relatively small thing like draining the swamp of its perverted leaders and spirit cooking Luciferians meets with outright rebellion and controversy… and yet we see no reason to tear our robes and repent before the Lord and to cry out for revival in our land. We are still entertaining ourselves with “proper and respectable” church services that get out at noon and we dismiss without ever crying out to God for something more.  Where is our desperation?

                Our guest speaker told a story about 2 little old women on a windswept island off the coast of Scotland. One of them was blind and the other was crippled and bent, but they prayed for revival and in time God brought revival to that small Island and people came from far and near to experience the outpouring of the Lord. Later one of their daughters migrated to America and she brought with her the little Bible that had been used to bring revival to that small island and in time she passed that Bible on to her son and that son is now the 45^th president of the United States and that very Bible now sits on his desk.

                Of course any Bible will bear mute testimony against what America has become. As long as its pages are closed its message is silenced and so the little revival Bible may only be symbolic of the tears of God as He weeps over us. How often would He have gathered us under His wings, like a mother hen gathers her chicks on a cold winter’s night?

                Does God really bring calamity upon a nation or does a nation simply reap what it sows? Does God really remove His hand of protection or do we just keep pushing it away until a nation more powerful and more evil than our own finally gains the upper hand?

                We sneer at China. We sneer at Russia. We prod them with sticks. We dare them to come out and fight, always forgetting that just one neutron bomb unleashing its energy 200 miles above America could shut down every power grid, every computer, ever car and truck and every store and every refrigeration unit and we would suddenly find ourselves in the stone age with no food, no water and no protection from the chaos, greed and violence that would follow. (An economic collapse could accomplish the same thing.)

                Even now, Russia has hyper sonic missiles for which we have no defense. A nuclear bomb set off under the ocean can send a 300 foot tsunami into any of our seacoast cities without warning. Satellites carry unknown payloads that pass over our heads day and night. We need God more than we can imagine and yet we continue to bask in the glow of our own prosperity.

                Our guest speaker said, “I don’t know anything about our president or whether he is a real Christian or not, but when I heard the story of the Bible that sits on his desk I thought maybe God has plans to do something for America if we will humble ourselves and pray. Like me, this pastor is not interested in the politics of it all, or who is who in the Whitehouse, He only looks with anticipation at what God might do if we will seek Him with all of our hearts.

                Friends, we need to be aware of the fact that even though Israel was God’s chosen nation and Jerusalem was His chosen city; when they gave themselves over to idols and spirit mediums and sin and perversion of every kind, God allowed enemy nations to come in and to invade the land and slaughter the people and rape the women and children and to haul them away as slaves to a foreign land.

                Today much of the church preaches a God who overlooks such things as Idolatry and abortion and the rejection of His Word and Satan worship and sexual perversion and violence and injustice. We have made a god in our own image and according to our liking. We ignore His Word and His history of dealing with abominations and we set this idol god up and worship him in the place of the true God of heaven. Our God is holy and He seeks a holy people who will come out from the world system to hunger and thirst for Him as a bride in waiting. God knows the whole world will not repent, but will His own people repent?

                So even though King Josiah did everything in his power to bring revival to the land, it was too late. Judah had crossed a tipping point beyond which it could not recover.

                So what is God going to do with us? Have we done enough to swing the pendulum back into God’s favor?  I hope so, but in truth, God has only given us one more fleeting chance to turn back to Him. He has bought America a little time to come to our knees. What we do with this precious time will determine how long the reprieve lasts, or how severe and immediate the judgments will be.

                Revival of any kind begins with a restoration of God’s Word. Revival is a return to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It means a return from the idols and our man made gods to the God who rules with righteousness, justice and mercy. Revival means being filled with the Holy Spirit and fire. It means returning to true godliness and holy living.

                We could go on for pages and pages describing what revival is and must be, but at the core of it, we need to be hungry. We must be hungry for the presence of God… hungry to move beyond our present state of being… hungry to grow into the likeness of Jesus… hungry to operate in the powers of the age to come so that we can reap the great harvest that God is preparing.

                It has long been my belief that judgment and revival will come together. I based my convictions on Joel’s announcement of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the last days. Peter used this same text at Pentecost even though most of what Joel said did not occur at that time.

                Joel paints a picture for us of the Holy Spirit being poured out upon all flesh. This didn’t happen at Pentecost for it only fell upon the 120 that had been praying for it. Then Joel goes on to describe the situation in the world when God’s Holy Spirit would be poured out. It will come when He displays wonders in the sky and on the earth. The sun will be darkened and the moon turned into blood. Well, we have had significant events in the sun, moon and stars over the last4 or 5 years, all of them falling on God’s appointed times. Did we pay attention? “And there will be blood and fire and columns of smoke and all of this will happen just before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. Joel 2:28-32.

                Then in chapter 3 Joel tells us saying: “For behold, in those days and at that time, when I restore the fortunes of Judah and Jerusalem, I will gather all nations and bring them down to the valley of Jehoshaphat. Then I will enter into judgment with them there on behalf of My people and My inheritance, Israel whom they have scattered among the nations; and they have divided up My land.” Joel 23:1-2

                So what do we see here? We see blood moons and solar eclipses. We see Israel back in its own land. We see Israel being divided. We see a major build-up to war as the surrounding nations unleash their hatred against God’s chosen people. And all of this happens before the great and awesome day of the Lord.

                One mistake we make is to presume that the “Day of the Lord” is the rapture when in fact, if you trace down everything the Bible says about the day of the Lord (and there is a lot) it is most often talking about the tribulation and not the rapture.

                So our interpretation of last day events is tenuous at best and should we not prepare ourselves for any eventuality?

                I heard a prophecy teacher say just recently that we don’t need to worry about the antichrist or the mark of the beast or any of that stuff in the book of Revelation because we won’t be here. I hope he is right, but on the other hand Paul said in 2 Thess. 2:4 that the Day of the Lord will not come unless the apostasy (falling away) comes first AND the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of perdition… “who opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God displaying himself as being God.

                So when does the antichrist take his seat in the temple of God and claim to be God? Jesus tells us in Mt. 24:15 saying:  “Therefore, when you see the ABOMINATION OF DESOLATION which was spoken of through Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place (let the reader understand) then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains…”

                Does this not plainly tell us that we will see the rise of the antichrist and the event where he enters the temple in Israel and claims to be God? Some may say, “Oh that is talking about the temple of our hearts, not the rebuilt temple in Jerusalem.” But if that is so, then why is it that the people in Judea must flee? Why specifically Judea? Have we not misappropriated these prophecies and used them for people everywhere in the world? We did this based upon replacement theology and the presumption that God had no more dealing s with Israel did we not? And yet, just as prophesied in places like Ezekiel 37:21-28. God has restored them to their land where He will come and dwell in their midst forever.

                So some of our outdated prophetic interpretations were made before Israel came back into their own land and I tend to believe that the great shaking that will happen in these last days is going to send everyone in every denomination and Bible believing group back to the drawing board to update their understanding of these events… me included. None of us has it right and we won’t have it right until certain events unfold that will force us to see it a certain way or to rebel against God altogether.

                Well, as always I have introduced controversial material and again I want to remind you that I am not trying to force feed doctrine or my views on anybody. I only desire for us to take a hard look at our traditions and presumptions and to realize that above all we need to enter into a time of repentance and revival so that regardless of what happens next, we will be empowered and ready to bring in the harvest that will surely come even as judgments fall upon the land.

                We have not repented as a nation and even a large portion of the church remains careless and indifferent to God’s warnings and even now many are falling away from the faith once delivered to the saints. We need to pray for revival and not just any revival, but the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and fire that will carry us to the return of Christ.

                This one thing I know. We will be caught up to meet the Lord BEFORE the wrath of God is poured out, for we see in Revelation 19 that when Jesus returns at His second coming, His saints will return with Him and that we can take to the bank for it is solid and well supported in scripture. Blessings to all!