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]Approaching a new year always seems to carry a sense of adventure and expectation, although that attitude is not normally mixed with the level of trepidation we might be feeling just now. Moses’ successor Joshua, one of two faithful spies, seems to have embodied this sense of courageous expectation much of his life, but even he needed an extra dose of Divine encouragement as the Lord commanded him to cross the Jordan and take possession of the promised Land.
As we approach the New Year, we’re back to making New Year’s resolutions … but this year is a bit different, since it’s not only a New Year but a New Decade! During the past ten years we’ve seen such radical changes in our society; the definition of marriage, millennia-old norms of gender identity, bath and locker-room privacy, have all been affected by court decisions as a sea change in social mores has swept through the western world. People of Biblical faith are witnessing the fulfillment of Isaiah’s warning, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!” [Isaiah 5:20]
There were thousands of people bundled up in freezing New York weather to witness a few short seconds during which a descending ball of light announces the arrival of a New Year — 2023. These hardy people endured the freezing air to mark the passage of time, but even more, because they were anticipating a “new beginning!” Saying goodbye to a tumultuous 2023, they were looking forward to making a fresh start in 2024!
Yeshua (Jesus) gave a remarkable parenthetic instruction in the middle of His Olivet discourse on the time of His coming and the end of the age. While it is unlikely that He himself said this, He certainly inspired Matthew to insert, “..let the reader understand”, concerning this critical event prophesied by Daniel, the Abomination of Desolation. His exhortation intended us (the readers of Matthew’s gospel) to learn what this means.
When I teach about “understanding the will of God,” I’d like to talk about a story that is told in all the synoptic gospels, except that Luke’s account gives a significant nuance. (Many skeptical Bible “critics” point out differences in the gospels to argue that they can’t be reliable — yet it’s actually the differences that support the validity of these accounts because they reveal that the events recorded were simply experienced and told from slightly different viewpoints, a very common circumstance when people are telling a story.)
Charles Swindoll wrote about these men who bring in animals from Africa for American zoos. They say that one of the hardest animals to catch there is the ringtailed monkey. For the Zulus of that continent, however, it’s simple. They’ve been catching this agile little animal with ease for years.
From the beginning, we anticipated a time when we would need to produce all our news content. Over the past month, as many of you are aware, we’ve fully shifted to generating articles exclusively through our dedicated in-house writing team. We’ve also expanded as we continue to freely syndicate our news to any online Christian ministry. Operating on faith and independent of advertising revenue, our ministry’s content is driven not by external factors but by a deep commitment to fulfilling the Lord’s will.