{"id":203,"date":"2013-06-19T09:56:04","date_gmt":"2013-06-19T13:56:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.westlakebaptist.org\/blog\/?p=203"},"modified":"2013-06-19T09:56:04","modified_gmt":"2013-06-19T13:56:04","slug":"revival-what-is-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.westlakebaptist.org\/blog\/revival-what-is-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Revival: What Is It?"},"content":{"rendered":"

For many years I have heard preachers say and I myself on various occasions have said “we need revival in America.”\u00a0 And it is possible that this is coming to me at this point because God has led me to begin a series on revival at Westlake beginning this Sunday.\u00a0 But a question came to my mind as I was praying over various passages to be used in the series.\u00a0 The question is this, what is revival?\u00a0 What does it look like?\u00a0 How will I know if it is happening, will I know?\u00a0 So I consulted a dictionary to get a working definition.\u00a0 First I looked in at 1828 Webster’s dictionary and it defined revival as “Return, recall or recovery to life from death or apparent death.”\u00a0 Then I looked at dictionary.com and the definition listed there is “restoration to life, consciousness, vigor, strength; an awakening, in a church or community<\/a>, of interest in and care for matters relating to personal religion<\/a>.”\u00a0 I find it interesting that in over a century’s time the definition for revival has changed very little, especially when so many words today mean something entirely different than they did even 50 years ago.\u00a0 What stuck out to me was in the dictionary.com definition it identified where the revival occurs when it says, “an awakening, in a church.”\u00a0<\/strong>One thing we need to realize is this, the only people who can be revived or those who were alive in the first place.\u00a0 If you have never been alive, how can you die in order to be revived?\u00a0 The obvious answer to that is that you can’t.\u00a0 Therefore, our prayer for America should primarily be that they would be made alive, which is only possible by faith in the Gospel, that is believing in the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ as the only means of forgiveness for sins and the only way into heaven.\u00a0 However, I believe in order for this to happen the church needs to experience a true revival.<\/p>\n

There is a promise from God to the nation of Israel.\u00a0 Let me say this before I get into it, I believe we must be very careful when applying a promise specific to Israel to the church.\u00a0 We can learn lessons from it and apply those lessons, but the church itself cannot claim a promise given to Israel, because they are not the same.\u00a0 Now onto the rest of the story.\u00a0 It is found in Ezekiel 37, it is known as the vision of the valley of dry bones.\u00a0 God gives the prophet Ezekiel a vision to encourage Ezekiel on how He is going to deal with Israel and to prove that God has not left Israel.\u00a0 This was important because at the time of Ezekiel’s writing he was among the Israelite captives in Babylon (Eze. 1:1).\u00a0 Because of Israel’s sin they were sent into captivity at the hands of the Babylonians for 70 years.\u00a0 I imagine that the Israelites after many years had given up hope of ever going back to their land.\u00a0 National moral was probably at an all-time low.\u00a0 But this vision is given by God to Ezekiel and he is able to share it with the captives.\u00a0 The vision is of an entire valley filled with dry bones and all of the sudden there was a “whole lot of shaking going on” (a tip of the cap to Jerry Lee Lewis fans).\u00a0 The bones began to stand up, form back into bodies, then the tendons, ligaments, and muscles reattached.\u00a0 The final piece was for God to breath life back into their bodies and they became living beings again.\u00a0 This vision symbolized that God would again restore the nation of Israel one day, they hadn’t been forgotten or left by God.\u00a0 This sparked great hope for the captives.\u00a0 The interesting thing is in this vision, God never tells them when it is going to happen, simply that it would happen.\u00a0 And that was enough to give them hope.<\/p>\n

I see a few good lessons for the church in this passage.\u00a0 First of all, revival only comes in God’s timing.\u00a0 I don’t know a single pastor who isn’t concerned about the spiritual condition of his church.\u00a0 It is the source of countless hours of prayer, the source of concern, and the source and at times desperation.\u00a0 Most pastors want to see the sanctuary full on Sundays, not to boost their ego but rather because we know that church is a place where transformation takes place, and we want to see our people transformed by the power of God.\u00a0 But we pastors also realize each Sunday that bringing the people to church is not easy.\u00a0 In a what I would argue is a post-Christian society, people are more skeptical of organized religion than ever before.\u00a0 The rise of those who do not associate themselves with any organized religion is on the rise.\u00a0 I do not believe people are “against God” as much as I believe they are against the church for various reasons (I realize we could probably argue this point).\u00a0 Therefore, we must realize that revival is in God’s time.\u00a0 We must remain faithful and be obedient in all points, but the results are in God’s hands.<\/p>\n

Another lesson I see in this story is that revival will be done God’s way.\u00a0 Remember, the Israelites were in captivity at the time of this message.\u00a0 Not only was the captivity part of God’s punishment for their rejection of Him, but it was also for their purification.\u00a0 The bible tells us in Proverbs 3 that when God disciplines it is always out of love with the intent of restoration.\u00a0 Much like the journey from Egypt to the Promised Land, Israel had to go through the desert to get to paradise.\u00a0 If the church is to experience revival, there will first have to be a time of purification.\u00a0 Simply put the things that shouldn’t be in the church are going to have to be purged from the church.\u00a0 Then and only then will it be ready for revival.<\/p>\n

Finally, if the church is going to experience revival it is going to take God breathing life into the church.\u00a0 In this day and age too many churches rely on the latest and greatest programs coming from Lifeway, Rick Warren, or whoever else.\u00a0 I can remember as I was getting into the ministry Rick Warren’s book, “The Purpose Driven Life” had just come out and churches of all denominations were jumping on it and trying to recreate Saddleback in their cities and towns.\u00a0 More recently there has been “Simple Church” by Thom Rainer and “Transformational Discipleship” by Ed Stetzer ad Philip Nation.\u00a0 Please don’t misunderstand me, these men and their books\/programs are not the problem.\u00a0 The problem is the church is taking a book or a program and almost in robot fashion implementing the suggestions and expecting the same results. This is dependence of man-made innovation (even well informed research projects) rather than the Spirit of God.\u00a0 Again, please hear me I am not again the books or even the programs.\u00a0 In fact I have used principles from Simple Church and Transformational Discipleship and continue to use them.\u00a0 But they were prayed over, carefully chosen aspects, and adapted to the context God has placed me in to minister.\u00a0 The bones in Ezekiel 37 were able to stand by themselves, but they didn’t come alive until God breathed into them.\u00a0 The church building is able to stand and function without God, but the church is not alive and making a difference if God is not breathing His breath into it.\u00a0 I don’t want a building where people are conformed to certain stereotypes or standards, I want to be where people are being transformed by the power of God.<\/p>\n

May we as the church be revived by the Spirit of God so that then we can go out and preach the Gospel to the world and they may be made alive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For many years I have heard preachers say and I myself on various occasions have said “we need revival in America.”\u00a0 And it is possible that this is coming to me at this point because God has led me to … Read More →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.westlakebaptist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.westlakebaptist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.westlakebaptist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.westlakebaptist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.westlakebaptist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.westlakebaptist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":204,"href":"https:\/\/www.westlakebaptist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions\/204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.westlakebaptist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.westlakebaptist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.westlakebaptist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}