Psalms 46:10 Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!
Leonardo da Vinci, who excelled at many things -- as a painter, sculptor, poet, architect, engineer, city planner, scientist, inventor, anatomist, military genius, and philosopher said a wise thing:
"Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer, since to remain constantly at work will cause you to lose power of judgment...Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller, and more of it can be taken in at a glance, and lack of harmony or proportion is more readily seen."
Have you found this to be the truth? We have! Any time we step back from a situation or project and take some time away, we undoubtedly gain new perspective and insight about it. Now, I know not all of us can take a week-long vacation at a luxurious resort to take time away from our difficulties, but we can, and must take a retreat with the Lord (which by the way, can be much more restful)! The Word says He makes me to lie down and green pastures -- It doesn't say He'd like us to, if we could try to take some time from our busy schedules -- it says He makes us!
It's time to take a rest from all the things that make us weary today -- ministry work included. Let's take some time out with the Lord and get quiet before Him. He has so many things He wants to reveal, if we would only give Him a chance to show us! He's has so many ways He wants to refresh us and refill our empty places, if we would only be obedient to His call!
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[worthy_plugins_devotion_single_body]As we discussed last week, the word for “sign” in ancient Hebrew is “oht”. It was used in Genesis to designate God’s covenant sign with Noah, (the rainbow). And we see now the same word again, in Exodus, identified with the deliverance of the Jewish people from the tenth plague, when the angel of death passed through all Egypt to strike the firstborn. Anyone under the “sign” of the blood was spared.
Yesterday we wrote about one of the greatest moves of God … the Moravian Revival. When the community was in complete disarray, Count Zinzendorf focused on how they could live together in love despite their differences. He called all the men together for an intense study of the Scriptures to focus on how Christian life in community was portrayed. These studies combined with intense prayer convinced many of the believers that they were called to live together in love and that their disunity and conflict were contrary to the clear calling of Scripture.
In the late 1800s, an awakening in South Africa led by Andrew Murray was a powerful move of God. Studying that revival yields essential insights concerning the events occurring now throughout the United States. As the spirit of God began to move in Cape Town, Murray compared the SA revival with past experiences of revivals in Europe. He decided that the intense “emotionalism” was a false experience of God and charged in to break up the meeting. Stepping out of the church, he encountered his father standing and weeping. His father rebuked Andrew, “How dare you stop something that I have prayed to happen for 30 years!”
Revivals, that is, genuine Divinely ordained seasons of the activity of God among men, have a universally unusual character. Normal activities and behaviors give way to the tangible influence of God’s Holy Spirit, whose inspiration brings a freedom of expression, emotion, conviction, worship, and other variations from normal experience.
During the Catholic inquisitions, as millions of Christians were being killed by the Jesuit Priests for apostasy, throughout Europe, Christians were fleeing. In Bohemia alone, there were an estimated 4,000,000 Christians before the Jesuit inquisition, and ten years later, only 800,000 people remained in Bohemia – all of whom were Catholic. These terrible events prepared the ground for one of the greatest moves of God that have ever been recorded, the Moravian Revival, which lasted for over 100 years. Gustav Warneck, the German Historian of Protestant Missions, testified, “This small church in twenty years called into being more missions than the whole Evangelical Church has done in two centuries.”
I love to study past revivals and in studying them, there are two recurring themes that stand out:
First, that He has often used obscure and unknown individuals to lead revivals, and that even these men whom He used so powerfully never considered themselves to be “special”, but often wanted to stay out of the limelight.
During the Great Depression, poverty swept across America like a whirling tornado, ripping up dreams and scattering hopes to the wind. One such poverty twister hit a small part of Texas where a man named Yates ran a sheep ranch. Struggling even to keep food on the table, Yates and his wife did all they could to survive. Finally, they had to accept a government subsidy or lose their home and land to the creditors.