Revival Sent From God by Raymond C Ortlund JR
Revival Sent From God
By Raymond C Ortlund JR
What the Bible Teaches for the Church Today
"If we look through the whole Bible and observe all the examples of prayer that we find there recorded, we shall not find so many prayers for any other mercy as for the deliverance, restoration and prosperity of the church and the advancement of God's glory and kingdom of grace in the world." Jonathan Edwards
This is chilling ..
"Do we want to guarantee that our children will run in the opposite direction of our most cherished biblical convictions? All we have to do is sterilise our churches. Make them rigid, unresponsive, grim. Require of our ministers that they play the role of scolding, scowling Reverend Eat-Your-Peas. Treat the gospel as a theological system only, rather than also as a personal remedy. Use the bible as ammunition for 'culture wars' rather than as food for life. Withdraw from the historical situation in which God has placed us. Build up the walls, reinforce the barriers and make certain that no experience gets in here. Ignore the fact that 'doctrine only' is not itself a biblical doctrine."
Stories like these really are amazing …
But God rent the heavens and came down. When George Whitfield ministered there in 1740 just 19 years later he wrote "so many persons come to me under conviction and for advice that I have scarcely time to eat bread. Wonderful things are doing here. The Word runs like lightning!"
The parish of Cambuslang near Glasgow was visited with unusual blessing. Upwards of 30,000 people showed up for a remarkable communion service there in 1742. This was a time when the total population of Glasgow itself was only around 17,000. But their season of blessing becomes all the more astonishing when we consider the human leadership that God was pleased to use. The parish minister was Reverend William McCulloch a steady unspectacular faithful man. What made the difference in that parish was not a sparkling human personality, supported by the apparatus of human promotion. What made the difference was the unusual touch of God on this ordinary man's ministry. And although the magnetic George Whitefield did come up from England eventually to help McCulloch in the exploding work the revival was 'no foreign importation, but had issued directly from the faithful preaching and labours of a somewhat colourless parish minister.'
The amazing thing about this book is that every chapter is like a sermon as Raymond Ortlund looks at different chapters in the bible that relate to revival and brings out such challenging thoughts on each. I am reading and re-reading them as I know I am not getting them all.
In his opening chapter Raymond looks at how the church is the salt of the earth and light of the world. It is the agent of divine redemption in human society. What could be more important for the world than the condition of the church?
Raymond relates the story of how one day as he sat on top of a mountain, he saw how puffy cumulus clouds cast shadows randomly on the valley floor. In one place all was green and bright whilst another was grey and subdued. This is what the church is like - in some quarters the light of God is streaming down in unclouded brilliance. The church is flooded with life and truth and joy. In other places a chill has set in. The colour has faded. God's people are living in the shadows.
I can relate to this picture as I sit here in my sunroom on this Sabbath morning. I have such a brilliant 180 degree view and you can clearly see how cloud and mist is at this moment blocking out the Donegal Hills but the town of Limavady is bathed in brilliant sunlight. And as I think of the many churches that will be open in my locality today I wonder - which one is bathed with life and truth and joy and which is cold?
Francis Schaeffer once prayed in public "O God we thank you that you exist." Have you ever thanked God for that?
Our only hope is that God is there.
He may withdraw from us the enjoyment of his nearness but he is still there.
Our present experience is not the full measure of his reality. God's glory is quite undiminished for its lying beyond the range of our vision. And as long as God is there, unchanged and unchanging, he can renew our experience of him there. The prophet Isaiah encourages us to pray with confidence in mind ...
"Look down from heaven and see
from your lofty throne, holy and glorious
Where are your zeal and your might?
Your tenderness and compassion are withheld from us.
But you are our Father,
though Abraham does not know us
or Israel acknowledge us:
you, O Lord are our Father,
our Redeemer from of old is your name."
Isaiah 63 verses 15 and 16
"Look down and see" calls for God to renew his attentive concern for us. This verse invites us to ask God to renew the visible demonstration of his concern for us. Do you feel as though God is far away today? Have you drifted from God like the people in Isaiah's time? This is the way to find God afresh. We cannot pray in this way unless we believe that no matter how barren our experience has become our Father is still there for us. Isaiah calls us to defy despair and pray for our renewed enjoyment of God's love. Our present experience does not determine our future. And today we can seek him with that confidence.
"Many people in our churches today are 'present but not voting'. They hear the Word. They receive the Lord's Supper. But they are not voting, not responding. They have little sense of the glory of God and the thrill of living flat-out for Christ. They expect little from God and venture little for God. God's promises and assurances in Scripture seem unreal."
"To the absence of the Spirit may be traced that vague sense of unreality which almost everywhere invests religion in our times. In the average church service the most real thing is the shadowy unreality of everything. The worshipper sits in a state of suspended thought; a kind of dreamy numbness creeps upon him; he hears words but they do not register; he cannot relate them to anything on his own life-level. He is conscious of having entered a kind of half-world; his mind surrenders itself to a more or less pleasant mood which passes with benediction, leaving no trace behind. It does not affect anything in his everyday life. He is aware of no power, no Presence, no spiritual reality. There is simply nothing in his experience corresponding to the things which he heard from the pulpit or sang in the hymns." A W Tozer
Me-first-ism" has come to feel so normal that we may have difficulty in believing that real people could live in any other way, especially when it costs.
Thanks to selfism, we now labour under a cruel tyranny: an ideal of physical beauty, youthful health, effortless wealth and autonomous personal control, all quite impossible to realise. But the pursuit of the ideal is very destructive. We may thank the beloved idol Self for today's neglected children, divorces, broken hearts, our widespread cynicism and disillusionment and sense of emptiness.
Even more we may thank selfism for the malaise infecting the church. The church which ought to be exposing the idol's vicious pretence has in some cases agreed to service the claims of Self as chaplain to an alien spirit. But most significantly for our purpose here, self-absorption hinders revival, because self-absorption is self-exaltation. Revival thrives in an atmosphere of self-humbling. So we have to choose between selfism and revival. We cannot have both.
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