From time to time you may hear someone calling on Christians to pray for revival to sweep across the land, and I too believe all God’s people should earnestly seek God’s sovereign grace to be enacted so that a wide spread revival of Christian faith bloom and explode over Australia. There is so much pain, corruption and brokenness all around, and no matter how hard the authorities work, and people of good intention exert themselves, nothing is helping in any significant or lasting way. What is needed is something that reaches deeper than addressing the symptoms of problems, and anyone who takes the Word of God seriously and has experienced the recreating grace of the Spirit of God in Christ Jesus, knows that only God can provide what is truly needed.
What is meant when we speak of revival? I think what most people mean when they speak of revival is a desire for the Word of salvation in Christ Jesus to attract large numbers of souls, convicting each one of their hopeless condition and hell bound status, so that they also repent of their unbelieving rebellious hearts and are blessed with a radical transplant of a living heart that believes the mercy and grace of God, and sees His glory in Christ Jesus. For there to be a significant change to the brokenness we see in our society and nation this is essential. Without it nothing and no one will change except in a continuing slide to dark paganism and barbarity.
But is this revival? To revive something there must still be some life in it. To revive a soul, there must be some pre-existent form of spiritual consciousness. The term revival might be better applied to a church or a group of Christians who have grown cold and dull in their passion of love and service for the Lord, but who, under God have their passion of devotion to the Lord re-ignited. It happens all the time. The cares of the world, the stress of over work, and the lure of the things of the world like popularity, wealth, luxury, ambition, all dull and deaden the soul’s desire of service to the Lord. The flame of spiritual life that once burned more fiercely begins to diminish and sometimes even flicker so much that it appears it may be extinguished altogether.
Our wonderful Lord won’t allow the truly Spirit blessed soul to die. Those who He has called He will most certainly bring home to Himself (Romans 8: 28-30). Yet, there are those deep and treacherously dark times which are only overcome as the Spirit of God re-awakens us and makes us more sensible again to the glory of God in Christ Jesus (2 Cor 4:6). Then, when the singing of His praises delights our hearts again, and His Word thrills us with both new blessing, and old blessing re-appreciated, there we speak of a revival of the soul. When this happens to a congregation the joy and excitement of the glory of God is multiplied any times over.
The person who, dead and condemned in sin to hell, but receives the sovereign hand of God upon them to give new birth to their soul is converted, not revived. They are raised from the dead to walk in newness of life eternal with God in heaven.
Whatever way the word “revival” is used, what is important is the desire that moves us to ask God to send such blessing.
My prayer is that souls insensible to the glory of God are raised to life, and that God would go on exerting His incomparable power in mercy and grant new life, so that His name is praised in ever greater degrees.
I also pray that may own soul be constantly revived so that I too may burn ever brighter in service and praise to the Lord, a prayer which involves and includes all my brothers and sisters in Christ, that together we will display the glory of our Lord and Saviour more clearly.
A comment by C.W. Hodge may encourage us here. Acknowledging that Reformed thought doesn’t get a great deal of recognition in theological circles and ecclesiastical courts yet, he wrote, “wherever humble souls catch the vision of God in His glory and bow in humility and adoration before Him, trusting for salvation only in His grace and power, there you have the essence of the Reformed Faith, and God in His providence may raise up a leader of religious thought who shall once again make the Reformed Faith a power in the theological world. If and when this happens we may confidently expect a true revival of religion in the Protestant world” (quoted in “Catch the Vision — Roots of the Reformed Recovery” John J. Murray).