James 5:7 Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain.
If you ever have the chance to visit Jerusalem, one place you must see is Solomon’s quarries – also known as Zedekiah’s cave. It’s a gigantic underground quarry beneath the old city of Jerusalem, an amazing archaeological site which offers a glimpse of the handiwork of the builders of the first temple of King Solomon. Can you imagine, as the Temple was under construction, what the craftsmen and the builders must have been thinking about this glorious house they were building?
Carpenters from Lebanon gathering cedar timbers, laborers moving building materials from Joppa, stonemasons cutting and honing stones – their imaginations must have been filled with expectation and wonder as the awesome heavenly plans given to King David materialized under their meticulous construction. Each of them had a part and a glimpse of its glory as he worked, waiting, anticipating… the final manifestation of the glory of the completed Temple!
Each of us is also a builder, but our building is a living Temple, and we are also living stones of this Temple of the living God. In our daily labors, we can catch a glimpse of the glory as we watch His image forming in ourselves and in those around us– but we can hardly begin to imagine the full splendor of His completed Bridal Temple!I’m sure there were times when the workers of Solomon’s Temple felt weary after a long hard day of work – but those memories had to be completely erased when they finally beheld the Temple in its glory! So if you’re feeling weary and tired – just remember, you are building something magnificent, and the sacrifices of your labor today, will be returned a hundredfold by the generosity and joy of your Heavenly Bridegroom!
Copyright 1999-2026 Worthy Devotions. This devotional was originally published on Worthy Devotions and was reproduced with permission.
How to display the above article within the Worthy Suite WordPress Plugin.
[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.