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SET OUR HEARTS ON FIRE CHAPTER ONE
Revival in Your Own Backyard
As if an unearthly fire had dropped out of the sky, in 1904 a spiritual awakening exploded on Wales. It spread from town to town, taking hold of men and women and especially young people who had never given God a second thought. People would awaken in the middle of the night and start pacing the floor, crying out to God for forgiveness of their sins. Repentance began flowing down the roads of Wales like a river. Enemies were reconciled. Restitution was made for wrongs committed years before.
As the spiritual fire spread from town to town, churches could not contain the crowds that came to surrender their lives to Jesus. Worship often lasted far into the night as people laid their hearts bare before the glory of God and committed themselves to walking in his will. The effects of this spiritual awakening spread across Europe, North America and even to India, stirring hearts to repentance and faith wherever it went.
For years some Christians had been praying for revival, but when it came, a twenty-six-year-old man named Evan Roberts seemed to be at the center of this awesome stirring of God's Spirit. An unlettered former coal miner, Roberts bore none of the marks of a modern celebrity evangelist. He did not know how to "work a crowd," and had he known, he would have repented at the thought. "Bend me, oh Lord!" was his constant prayer. His desire was that God's strength be made perfect in his weakness.
Roberts understood that this was God's revival, God's program. His responsibility was to fit into it. Jesus alone was directing the outpouring of divine fire on Wales and the world beyond.
God alone can measure the results of the Welsh Revival and the numberless outbursts of life from the Spirit before and since. But certain characteristics appear whenever the phenomenon we call revival occurs. I want to examine the essence of revival as it visits us as individuals and spreads through our churches.
On October 13, 1971, in a small Baptist church in Saskatoon, Canada, the Sutera twins, evangelists from Ohio, began what they expected to be a ten-day crusade. It seems that the fire that fell on Wales fell on this little church. A spirit of repentance swept through the assembly, as people crowded the altar confessing their sins, asking for forgiveness and renewing their commitment to the Lord Jesus. By the third night Ebenezer Baptist Church could not contain the numbers, and for the next seven weeks, the venue kept changing, as larger and larger facilities were needed to accommodate the swelling numbers. The "afterglow" of these meetings often lasted into the early hours of the morning, as people transacted business with the living God and became reconciled with each other. Wrongs were righted. Restitution was made wherever possible. These acts of obedience to the Spirit were followed by a joy which most of the participants in this revival had never known.
The revival spread south to Regina, Saskatchewan's capital city, east to Winnipeg, west to Vancouver and south into the United States. It crossed the Atlantic and ignited churches in Holland, always with similar results: cleansing and renewal in the church, fresh commitment and reconciliation in the lives of believers.
Revival – What It Is Since the word revival is used in so many ways, let's begin with a definition of revival: what it is; what it does; and what it is not.
Revival is a work of the Holy Spirit in which hearts are urgently awakened to the reality of Jesus, moved to repentance and set free to live consistently in God's redemptive will.
Ideally this should happen whenever believers come together. Every worship gathering, every prayer meeting should be a mini revival. If we are gathered in his name and Jesus is in our midst, should not his Spirit awaken us afresh to his reality, move us to repentance and free us to live the gospel of the kingdom?
The Lord Jesus never ceases to do his part. But with the passing of time, followers of Jesus often relinquish their first love and settle into a "comfortable Christian walk" that is far beneath the call of the Master. He stands at the door and knocks and waits, while we pretend to be in full fellowship with Him.
Revival occurs when we are awakened to recognize that our "fellowship with him" is an illusion; that the Master is still knocking at the door, waiting for us to open it. We repent. We open the door to the Master, meet him and love him anew and are empowered to follow him in doing the Father's will.
What Revival Does Revival accomplishes three things: 1. It quickens our relationship with Jesus. 2. It brings us into unity with sisters and brothers in the body of Christ. 3. It moves us to reach out in love to those who have not yet met the Master and to those who have drifted away from him. Again, these things should happen daily in the body of Christ. But our weak and ineffective outreach to the world is often a sign that something is lacking in our unity with each other. And the lack of unity in our life together as believers is always a sign that we need to cleanse and strengthen our relationship with Jesus. What Revival Is Not Revival is not the result of human engineering. We can pray for revival. We can prepare our hearts for a fresh encounter with the Spirit of God. But we cannot make it happen. Nor can we guide it, when it comes. It will come when God wants it to, where God wants it to, and it will take whatever shape God chooses that it should take.
Revival is not built around a human personality. Yielded human servants will always be found at the heart of a revival. But these servants remain useful to God's purpose only as long as they remain yielded and submissive to him. The minute they succumb to the temptation to control the revival, channel it where they wish it to go or put their personal stamp upon it, the revival will begin to diminish.
A revival cannot be preserved by human by-laws and constitutions. We can make all the rules we want to in an effort to insure that the revival remains doctrinally sound and spiritually alive. But the sustaining power comes from above and remains among us only as long as we are obedient to the living Word.
Thirst for Revival In our rapidly changing world there is a growing thirst for something with more depth and integrity than what is commonly equated with churchgoing and respectability.
Many of us hear about revival taking place in a certain city or a certain church, and we wish we were there. We wish we could experience what we read about in reports coming in from Africa and Russia and Brazil. Surely God can see that we need revival as desperately as those "favored ones" who are already igniting with heaven's fire.
How long can a person survive where the spiritual diet is poor? If week after week, we go looking for living bread and come home hungry, will we not soon waste away spiritually? "I need to be fed," is the complaint of a host of believers who fold up their tents and move on every few years in search of better spiritual food.
More life. Clearer vision. Where can I find it?
Without a doubt, there is a revival "out there." It is breaking out in many places, flowing together, gathering momentum. One day soon we may all be part of it.
But there is also a revival close at hand. From Scripture, and from the Spirit's witness in our own hearts, we learn that the revival close at hand requires our full attention. If we focus on the revival "here," we will soon be part of the revival "out there," even if we never leave our hometown. "If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!" (Lk 11:13).
The search begins, not in some other place, but exactly where we are. Revival is closer to us than we think. As Jesus builds up to his promise that the heavenly Father will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him, he tells us that no one is left out. "For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened" (Lk 11:10). But Jesus also encourages us to be persistent, like the man pestering his friend at midnight for bread to feed an unexpected visitor. Keep at it. Don't quit.
I remember a man who took that exhortation very seriously. Aubrey had been attending the Church of Our Saviour for only a few weeks, but it was clear that his heart had been crying out for a long, long time. He wasn't sure what he was looking for when he came to the study for a talk, but he knew that, whatever it was, it would have to come from God.
The following Sunday Aubrey went forward and knelt at the front of the church. This was nothing new. He had done this before; he was knocking, he was seeking. But this time something happened. He began to tremble, and while voices around him were singing and praying, Aubrey heard a voice from somewhere within which said, "You're looking for my grace, and I give it to you now."
On his return home, his wife knew immediately that something was different about him. Here was the same face, but her husband's heart seemed softer. "Aubrey, are you all right?" she asked. Aubrey smiled. "Believe me, I've never been better." The test came in the days that followed. If what came to Aubrey that day, as he knelt and trembled, was truly the presence of Jesus, then the life of Jesus would begin to manifest itself in Aubrey's daily walk. Eileen would experience a kinder, more thoughtful husband. Fellow employees at the bank would see a man beginning to change. Aubrey would hear Jesus speaking to him through the Scriptures. Prayer would become his mainstay. I can remember, as I watched this happening to Aubrey, that it wasn't all peaches and cream. He had his struggles. But there was no doubt in my mind that this man traveled a new road as one who had found renewal through an outpouring of God's Spirit on his life. All of us who knew him could see Aubrey's life beginning to manifest the love of Jesus on a daily, down-to-earth basis, in his home, at church, at the bank, among his friends. And his fire ignited our hearts as well. Lighting the Flame of Revival Who isn't thirsting for more of this fire? Even the most joyful charismatics yearn to find, beyond their moments of ecstasy, a daily life that burns with a steady flame, a flame that imparts a clear awareness of God's call on their lives and his power in their hearts, so that they can get something done for his kingdom and persevere through the coming storms.
Lord, set our hearts aflame! Cause the Shekinah glory to descend and ignite us with unquenchable fire! The answer to this common heart-cry is rapidly manifesting itself across the earth. The fire is falling with unprecedented power in unexpected places and upon people who might seem to be unlikely candidates. People like you.
God wants to use you to bring fresh life to his church and signs of healing to the multitudes beyond it. He will accomplish through you far more than you would dare to imagine. All you have to do is fit into the program – God's program which is astonishingly different from all the humanly initiated "programs" for revival.
God's program is clearly revealed in Jesus and the way he went about things. In this book I want to focus on God's program for revival as revealed in Jesus and as it applies to our lives today. Put in simplest terms, the Son emptied himself of his glory, became one of us, received the fire and spread it. He never promoted himself. He used no gimmicks. He never took his cue from his audience, never tailored his approach to their whims. He looked only to the Father for every word he spoke and every deed he performed. And he did all this as the Son of Man, even though he was indeed the Son of God.
Jesus walked by faith, even as we need to walk by faith. Jesus, as the Son of Man, depended entirely on the direction and power of the Holy Spirit, even as we need to depend entirely on the Holy Spirit. His obedience took him to a cross, but it paid off in resurrection life — not only for him but for us, his disciples. This resurrection life is the revival we're after, the fire from heaven we need. And it's ours in abundance, provided we are willing to do things his way, instead of our own.
His way is both glorious and costly. Glorious because it floods us and surrounds us with the blazing fire of heaven — joy in God's Holy Spirit — every hour of the day and night; costly because it lays on each of us a cross, a death, which we carry around in our hearts as long as we remain in these bodies of flesh and blood. Our lives are no longer our own. They belong to him. Literally. In a mystery that confounds the devil himself, we are crucified with Christ; it is no longer we who live, but Christ who lives in us. And the life that we now live in these bodies of flesh and blood, we five by faith in the Son of God, Who loved us and gave himself for us (see Gal 2:20). We begin to have the fire. Revival burns within us.
In this book I want to show how revival from God is poised and waiting to ignite our personal lives the moment we are willing to yield to it. We may be removed from the "hot spots" of revival by time or distance. But each of us is in a place where it can happen. I want to go on to show how every genuine revival in the individual leads to cleansing and increased life in the body of Christ. The Lord Jesus will set your heart on fire so that you can be a torch in his hand. His desire is to cause the revival to spread to others through you in simple, undramatic, practical ways.
As an example of how revival in a solitary life begins to spread through the entire body, consider Lily. When I first met Lily, she struck me as a prim, precise closed book. She was a private person. She had learned through costly experience what can happen when you open your heart to the wrong person. She was competent on her job, got along well with everybody in the office, but no one really knew what was going on behind those piercing eyes and that quick smile.
Through a singles group, Lily found her way into a small Bible study that met on Thursday evenings around a table in the basement of a church she never attended. For weeks Lily hardly said a word. But when she spoke, it was evident that this private person was on a serious search.
Then it happened. How it happened, Lily herself would be hard put to explain. But one evening she opened her mouth and began talking about the needs around her and about her own thirst. The curtain behind the eyes opened, the smile became warm, as Jesus began to manifest his love to her – and through her. Before long, anyone could see that private Lily was becoming a one-woman welcoming committee for the kingdom of God. She began reaching out in love to her sisters and brothers in the group, to her neighbors, to friends from work. The flame in Lily's heart was contagious. Almost without effort she brought encouragement and hope to people around her.
You may protest and say that Lily's quiet transformation is hardly a Welsh Revival. True, but if the Spirit that raised Lily from spiritual death is the same Spirit of Jesus that created the Welsh Revival, who knows the victories that may yet be won by this woman? And who can measure the life which even now flows from heaven through her obedience into others in need?
We may well be approaching a time of revival of which the Welsh Revival was but a minute foretaste. Reports are coming in of hundreds of new congregations springing up in Russia in the midst of grinding poverty and renewed harassment from the state. In a single year new believers on the continent of Africa are numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Decades of oppression have only served to strengthen the house church movement in China.
As we hear of these and other grassroots movements among believers, we have reason to hope that a widespread spiritual awakening has already begun. But the revival that requires your full attention is the revival that God desires to bring to you, the spiritual awakening that is prepared to visit your own backyard, your kitchen, your church. That's the revival on which to concentrate. Because, in very fact, that revival is already closer to you than your own breath. It is prepared to manifest itself to you and ignite your heart with the same fire that consumed Elijah's sacrifice and fell on our brothers and sisters at Pentecost.
Are you ready to receive it? Are you willing to let it spread through you?
LORD, SET MY HEART ON FIRE!
From "Set Our Hearts On Fire" published by Servant Publications 1998 |
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