a blog for the summer missions training team from Bethel Baptist Church

Sunday, March 04, 2007

Continuous Revival (Introduction)

At some point, every Christian needs to discover the way of continuous revival—the subject of our Bible lessons for the English Bible Camp we are planning for July 3-7 in Bunia. The idea of continuous revival is based on a statement made by Jesus Himself in John 4:14… “whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.”

Continuous revival is a message from God that simply and thoroughly reaches down to where ordinary folks live, and is found to be the secret of victorious living. What follows is an adaptation of a booklet by Norman P. Grubb, describing his experiences in Central Africa in the middle of the last century, influenced by additional teaching from a sermon delivered at last year's Together for the Gospel conference entitled "Watch Your Life" by C.J. Mahaney.

First, we need to understand what we mean by “revival.” When we come down to it in simplest form, it means the re-viving of dead areas in our lives—bringing to the light areas in our lives where we have come face to face with sin unobserved before and bringing them to the cleansing blood.

The transforming truth of that definition of revival shakes us out of the misconception that revival can only come in great soul-shaking outpourings of the Spirit. Thank God for such when they do come; they have been the great and precious hurricanes of the Spirit in the history of the Church. However, as Christians we can fall into defeatism and almost hopelessness by thinking that we can do nothing about revival except pray, often rather unbelievingly, and wait until the heavens tear open and God comes down. It is critical to see that “revival” in its truest sense is an everyday affair right down within the reach of everyday folk to be experienced in our hearts, homes and churches, and in our fields of service.

When revival does burst forth in greater and more public ways, thank God; but meanwhile we can see to it that we are being ourselves constantly revived persons, which of course also means that others are getting revived in our own circles. By this means God can have channels of revival by the thousands in all the churches of the world!

What we are attempting to describe this week is not just the passing on of a mere theory, but what has come by seeing continuous revival in action among communities; by experiencing the same working of the Spirit in our own lives; by examining and grasping in some measure the Scriptural basis of this continuous revival, and finally by seeing God move in revival in many others through the presentation of this message and testimony. Our belief in continuous revival should be a matter of seeing it, learning it, experiencing it and transmitting it.

The truth is that revival is really the Reviver in action, and He came two thousand years ago at Pentecost. Revival, therefore, is not so much a vertical outpouring from heaven, for the Reviver is already here in His temple. The Holy Spirit truly dwells in the bodies of the redeemed. Therefore, revival is more a horizontal out-moving of the Reviver through these temples into the world. It is a horizontal, rather than a vertical movement, and the importance of this fact will be seen later.

Labels:

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home