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]I love this story! Peter was sitting between two guards and suddenly an angel of the Lord comes to him and frees him — and he thinks it’s a vision! He’s not sure if he truly believes it.
“Exhausted but still in pursuit…” Well, now we know why the angel of YHVH addressed Gideon the way he did. With his small three hundred man army he had just decimated the army of Midian — but the victory wasn’t complete, and so the Jewish general and his small, exhausted, hungry, band were determined to cross the Jordan and take care of 15,000 additional Midanite enemies and their leaders, Zebah and Zalmunna.
His nightmares began each day when he awoke. James Stegalls was nineteen. He was in Vietnam. Though he carried a small Gideon New Testament in his shirt pocket, he couldn’t bring himself to read it. His buddies were cut down around him, terror was building within him, and God seemed far away. His twentieth birthday passed, then his twenty-first. At last, he felt he couldn’t go on.
On January 1st 1863, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation which proclaimed freedom for all slaves in the ten states which were in rebellion. At the time, when U.S. Secretary of State Seward took the document to the President to sign, Lincoln took a pen, and held it for a moment. He then removed his hand and dropped his pen. Lincoln turned to Seward and said, “I have been shaking hands since nine o’clock this morning and my right arm is almost paralyzed. If my name ever goes into history, it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.” He hesitated, then took the pen, and without wavering, took the document and boldly signed it!
For nearly 2000 years the Jewish people were scattered across the world without a homeland. In one day, according to the meticulous preparation of God, on May 14th 1948, the nation of Israel was restored. As millions of Jews were returning to their homeland they began rebuilding the ancient cities that were destroyed, restoring the desolations of many generations, and fulfilling Biblical prophecy…
As we celebrated Shavuot last night, we’re looking at the promise given 2000 years ago: that normal people will lead extraordinary lives; that disciples, who were terrified on the night of Yeshua’s (Jesus) death, were transformed into bold saints of God; and that fishermen, tax collectors, and housewives – normal everyday people – became empowered, and turned the Roman Empire inside out and upside down!
The disciples worried — we only have five small loaves and two fishes! What ever will we do?? Five loaves and two fishes could never feed the multitudes in the natural realm! But we have a God who is in the multiplication business! He works on an entirely different mathematical equation than we are accustomed to — He takes the little we offer and turns it into more than we could fathom!