1 Cor. 3:3-4 for you are still fleshly. For insofar as there is jealousy, strife, and factions among you, aren’t you fleshly, and don’t you walk in the ways of men? For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” aren’t you fleshly?
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.
It began with a young man, Count Zinzendorf, who was 27 years old when he opened his estate to welcome believers escaping persecution and inviting them to settle there. There were different groups, Bohemian Brethren, Moravian Christians, Reformed Christians, and unsatisfied Catholics. After a few years, this fragmented community of some 300 individuals with differing spiritual convictions and loyalties was so rife with conflict and disunity it seemed destined to fail.
One of the village founders, Christian David, got so caught up in apocalyptic fanaticism that he referred to Zinzendorf as the “Beast of the Apocalypse,” while the estate manager of the village, Johan Andreas Rothe was termed the “False Prophet.” In this impossible environment, Count Zinzendorf devoted himself full-time to reconciliation and conflict resolution, visiting each home for prayer and exemplifying the persevering love of Christ.
Amazingly, this personal attention and devotion to unity and reconciliation opened the way for an awakening that would come in just a few weeks. Yet what would have happened if Count Zinzendorf had lost patience and, in justified frustration, thrown everyone off his estate? Instead of a 100-year spiritual awakening…NOTHING of spiritual significance would have happened. The enemy, working through the carnal attitudes of believers [1 Corinthians 3:3-4], continually slandered this young man and one another, but his response was to disarm those persecuting him with the love of Christ. The result was a genuine revival.
Disunity, and slander are deadly to spiritual life and will absolutely kill any hope of enjoying God’s presence. This is true in the smallest company of two or three, or in a local church community, or in any size gathering at all. When the Lord is moving, He will bring humility and love as Zinzindorf did. Let this humble Count be your example in any sphere of responsibility God places you. God is always desiring to birth something supernatural!
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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.