Hosea 10:12 Sow for yourselves righteousness; Reap in mercy; Break up your fallow ground, For it is time to seek the Lord, Till He comes and rains righteousness on you.
Over the years I’ve often gotten emails asking “When do you think revival will come?”
Well…. first, what is “revival”, exactly? One of Merriam-Webster’s definitions is “a renewed attention to or interest in something“. Here are some important questions for us to answer today:
How interested are we in knowing Him more intimately today than yesterday?
How interested are we in gaining a greater knowledge and understanding of His Word?
And just how interested are we in sharing those precious things with the dying world around us?
A true revival must begin with us — it must be intimately personal. And it’s not just a one-time thing, either. Once, a lady asked Billy Sunday “Why do you keep having revival meetings?” He quickly retorted, “Why do you always take a bath?”
Revival is something that needs to happen daily. It’s an ongoing transformation of our hearts to be constantly moved by the Spirit of God. We need to be daily breaking up our fallow ground, those places in our hearts which we’ve allowed to grow hard. We have to ask the Lord to reveal those hard places, pray that He would forgive us and ask Him to heal all our rough edges that we might be soft before Him and sensitive to His leading. As we open ourselves to the moving of the Spirit of God … then we will usher in a new move of God within us.
Let’s get serious as we approach Shavuot (Pentecost) this coming weekend! It’s a new season — so let’s begin this season the right way — in revival!
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[worthy_plugins_devotion_single_body]These verses are far more than ancient lyrics — they are a spiritual invitation. The psalmist doesn’t just admire the gate — he pleads for it to open. “Open to me the gates of righteousness…” This is the cry of a heart that longs for access to God, not by merit, but by mercy. In Hebrew thought, gates represent transition points — thresholds between the common and the holy, the outside and the inner court, the temporal and the eternal. These are not man-made doors — they are divine entrances into the presence and promises of the LORD.
As we continue our study in Psalm 118, I want to take a deep dive into verses 17-18, where the psalmist makes one of the boldest declarations in all of Scripture: “I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the LORD.” This isn’t the voice of someone untouched by pain — it’s the cry of someone who has been through the fire and come out declaring God’s faithfulness. This statement is not a denial of suffering; it’s a defiance of death. It’s the resolve of a heart that’s been chastened, refined, and pressed, yet remains confident in the God who preserves life — not just for survival, but for purpose.
Over the past two devotionals, we heard the song of the redeemed and stood at the wells of salvation. We saw how strength, song, and salvation flow from Yeshua Himself — how the joy of drawing from His presence is not just a poetic promise but a lifeline for our day. Yet today, we stand at a prophetic threshold. Something has shifted. Something has broken open. We are not only being refreshed — we are being awakened and called.
Yesterday, we heard the anthem of the redeemed rise like a trumpet blast: “The LORD is my strength and song, and He has become my salvation.” We explored how this was more than personal — it was prophetic, Messianic, and generational. We saw Yeshua not only as our Deliverer but as the very embodiment of God’s strength, the melody of our praise, and the fulfillment of every promise. We stood in awe as tents of rejoicing rose in the midst of warfare, and households became sanctuaries of celebration. But today, we go deeper — we step to the well.
There’s a reason this verse resounds like a national anthem of the redeemed. It’s not just a personal declaration—it’s a generational cry that echoes back to Moses at the Red Sea (Exodus 15:2) and forward to the final deliverance of Israel. The Hebrew word for salvation—Yeshua—makes this verse unmistakably Messianic. It isn’t a vague deliverance. It is the revelation of Yeshua (Jesus), the Deliverer, who embodies strength, becomes our song, and stands as the fulfillment of God’s redemptive plan.
The cry that shattered the stillness of Golgotha—“My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Psalm 22:1; Matthew 27:46)—was not a random cry of despair, but the deliberate voice of Yeshua pointing to Scripture. As He hung on the tree, bearing the sin of the world, He invoked the ancient words of David—not only identifying Himself as the righteous sufferer, but signaling that Psalm 22 was unfolding before their very eyes. In that moment, heaven and earth bore witness to a divine mystery: the Holy One, seemingly abandoned, was fulfilling a prophecy written a millennium earlier. Yeshua did not merely suffer—He fulfilled every word, every shadow, every stroke of divine prophecy.
King David wrote these words generations before the empty tomb shook the foundations of death. At first glance, Psalm 16 reads like a personal prayer of trust — a yearning for security and closeness with God. But beneath the surface, the Spirit was revealing something deeper, something eternal: a promise not just for David, but for all of us.