Revival: It's Costly

Revival Requires Purity

"Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully. He shall receive the blessing from the Lord, and righteousness from the God of his salvation."

Psalm 24:3-5

Revival is a place where we have received the blessing.  We meet the qualifications God has set before us, receive the blessing, and then walk it out.  And to do this, we need clean hands and a pure heart.

Revival Requires Work

"Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple. For which one of you, when he wants to build a tower, does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who observe it begin to ridicule him,…"

Luke 14:27-29

We need to realize that revival requires building a tower.  It requires work and effort, but more than that, it requires yielding to the Holy Spirit and His measure of faith.  It's empowerment by the Holy Spirit that gets the work done.  To be empowered by the Spirit and enjoy life in the Spirit, we need to experience death to ourselves.  That's the cost.  Every time we 'die', we are filled with His word, which is Spirit and Life (John 6:63).  Every time we die to ourselves, we receive a fresh anointing and a fresh empowerment.  And that's what gets the tower built.

Instructions for Revival:

"Always be joyful. Never stop praying. Be thankful in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you who belong to Christ Jesus.

Do not stifle the Holy Spirit. Do not scoff at prophecies...."

1 Thessalonians 5:16-20



Revival Requires Prayer

Here we can receive insight into what gets revival started.  If we are always joyful, if we never stop praying, then we can expect the move of the Spirit to come.  We need to pray it through.  Then, we can expect the beginning of revival. And that's when it's important that we do not stifle Him.  We have to let Him do the work!



Revival Requires Humility

If the Holy Spirit is beginning something, we need to let Him carry it out.  We need to let Him speak and move through any vessel He chooses.  We can't despise the wisdom of another.  We can't despise a prophecy.  Pride and presumption will put an end to revival!  We need to be humble and let the Holy Spirit flow.  We need to speak up when God prompts us, and remain quiet when He doesn't. We need to acknowledge that others are seeing in part (1 Corinthians 13:9), just as we are.  We need to remember that others, too, have paid the price.  We need to remember that all of us are hungry for a move of God, hungry for revival!

There are conditions to revival.  Some may disagree with this, but I believe that there are conditions to meet before God's promises are fulfilled.  God's love is unconditional, but His blessings are not. We need to go up higher and receive the blessing from the Lord.  We need to contend for revival.  It will come if we really, really want it.

Faith is A Force

"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

Hebrews 11:1

Faith changes things.  Faith is the Holy Spirit within us agreeing with God.  Any gift or blessing or victory that God wants to give us comes by faith.  Faith is what makes God's perfect will possible.  

Let's look into this verse a little bit, starting out with the first half of it:

"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for..."

There are things that all of us are hoping for that have not yet come to pass.  We've been hoping in God's promises, in His Logos and Rhema Word, and we haven't seen everything yet.  And that's okay--delays are OK--as long as we have faith!  Faith manifests the things that we've been hoping for.  Faith is as tangible as God's promises get, prior to their actual fulfillment.  And if faith is that tangible, if it's an actual substance, then we can see that our faith paves the way for God to act on our behalf.  Faith is a force that works in companionship with hope, bringing first spiritual substance and then physical substance into our lives.  Faith is a force that changes things.

"...the evidence of things not seen."

We need to remember that God is the One who can make something wonderful out of nothing.  We need to remember that things we are not yet seeing will soon be brought to us.  We need to remember that it is God who makes all things possible.  It's God who brings all His promised to pass.  And our faith need to acknowledge this.  Our faith needs to have God's foresight.  Our faith needs to produce actions, so that these actions can serve as proof--evidence-- of things yet to come.  

And if our faith is evidence of God's future purposes, then the way we live our lives today should be evidence of our faith.   Our faith will point to that future point in time when God does a miracle. Our faith will lead us to walk in a way that looks foolish to the outside world.  Our faith will probably even make us look foolish to other Christians!  Our faith should lead us to expect God to come through.   Our faith may lead us into 'dangerous' situations.

Before God comes through, our faith will be the only evidence that others can see of His future plans. In a sense, our faith will be prophetic, and our faith will be ahead of it's time. God chooses the foolish things to shame the wise--eventually!  In the meantime, however, others may try to shame us if we live according to a higher measure of faith.  Even then, it's up to us to provide the only evidence we can--our faith--of that coming moment when God fulfills our hopes.

If we have faith, we should have works.  Our faith and our actions should be in agreement!  Together, they will provide the initial evidence of God's plans.  Together, they will eventually provide the foundation for an amazing testimony.  When God comes through, and when others see that He rewarded our faith, that's when the foolish things shame the wise.  That's when true wisdom is--finally--proved right by her actions (Matthew 11:19).  That's when others can see that we partnered with the Lord.  That's when others can see that we were right act 'foolishly' and put all our faith in God.  

To quote Kenneth Copeland, faith is a force.  It is the force that brings us into alignment with God, and it is the force that makes something "on earth as it is in Heaven".  Faith is a force that heals and saves and delivers.  Faith is a force that encourages God to do something big.  

Dream: The Importance of Feast Days

"And ye shall observe the feast of unleavened bread; for in this selfsame day have I brought your armies out of the land of Egypt: therefore shall ye observe this day in your generations by an ordinance for ever."         Genesis 12:17

"And this day shall be unto you for a memorial; and ye shall keep it a feast to the LORD throughout your generations; ye shall keep it a feast by an ordinance for ever."    Exodus 12:14

I've been thinking about Old Testament regulations a lot recently.  Vanessa and I feel that it's been the Lord who's brought such things to our attention.

See, when God is speaking to Moses about feast days, celebration days, etc...He tends to use the words, 'for ever'.... quite frequently.  And I think there's significance to that.  God didn't say to keep such rules until His Son came.  He could have specified that, but He didn't.  There are many such Old Testament commemorations that God instructed His children to keep, for ever.

"For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished."

Matthew 5:18

Even a few things Jesus said have made us think.  Heaven and earth have not yet passed away!  Though I don't have even close to a full revelation on all this, yet, I feel that some of aspects of the Word here just can't be discounted.  To summarize, I'd say that the Law is good (1 Timothy 1:8).

And I had a dream last week that really convicted me.  You know when you have a dream that you just know is from God?  This was one of those.  So, in the dream, I was being shown a pamphlet full of Heavenly revelation.  And I was reading a page that was titled something along the lines of, "The Importance of Feast Days".

On this page, there were several bullet points, and under each bullet there was an awesome description of why God ordained dates and calendars to be the way they were.  As I read more and more, the amount of wisdom and revelation coming through was astonishing.  I realized what God intended when He made things the way He did.  And I read all about the specific reasons for the feast days He established.  Reading through that page was pretty amazing, and I had God's heart for the ancient Israelites conveyed to me in a way that's hard to describe.  I realized in a new way just how meticulous, thoughtful, and wise God is in the things that He does--the things that He does for our own good.

I woke up the next morning remembering the dream, but having completely forgotten the specifics of what I'd read.  And I think that's what God intended.  Some of the stuff I read probably wasn't meant to be made known!  But this dream convicted me of the tremendous physical and spiritual benefits that will come by following God's calendar of religious feasts and fasts.

Like I said, I don't have all this figured out yet.  But I feel like there is something to it.  For now, I'll liken keeping the Old Testament Law--whether by observing feast days, religious fasts, the Sabbath, or dietary rules--to icing on the cake, so to speak.  The Law cannot save you!  Nonetheless, I think it pleases God if His children show a conviction for the Law.  I think it pleases Him if we show our interest and appreciate His workings of the past.   I think that the ancient Hebrew calendar, which God first made for His chosen people and continues to work by, is worth researching.