We need to see the reviving of the Power and the manifestation of God! And we need to see the same evidences that were present in the early Church: the speaking in tongues and the miracles of healing that followed the apostles after they had received the Holy Spirit. The prophet in Habakkuk 3:2 puts this quite bluntly, “REVIVE Your Work O Lord!” This is the cry that should come from us at this very time, “Lord, REVIVE Your Work!” When God revives, He revives His Work – in us!
When we celebrate Pentecost each year in the Church, it is the celebration of what happened in Acts 2, when the Holy Spirit descended on 120 disciples, who were all gathered together in prayer. Most people accept this at the beginning of the Church, and we all know the tremendous effect this first outpouring had!
Historically however, the problem with the Church has been very much as it was with Israel in the Old Testament, a coming and going, at one time high, worshipping God, another time low, turning away from God. What we need to see at this present time is a revival or spiritual awakening in the Church today. I’ve been searching my Bible for the word ‘revival’ – in the King James Version it appears only seven times, and is the English translation of at least three different words in the original Scripture, depending on the context. Our English word ‘revival’ comes from the French, meaning to live again, to bring back to life, to revive something! You can revive things that look to be dead. You can revive plants, you can revive people that have collapsed. You can revive things that appear dead, but not yet totally dead…
So looking through the Scriptures I found this verse in Psalm 138:7, ‘Though I walk in the midst of trouble, You will REVIVE me, You will stretch forth Your Hand against my enemies.’ Looking at the situation through which we’ve come and all the difficulties of the lockdown, the churches being shut, I feel that this verse is very appropriate: though I walk in the midst of trouble, YOU WILL REVIVE me! When we’re in trouble, the Lord WILL revive us!
In Psalm 13:3, in one translation, David is saying, ‘REVIVE me or I die!’ This is the extremity: if you don’t revive, you die! Think about people who are unconscious, in a coma, or in great medical difficulty as in an intensive care unit – they need reviving or they die!
Unless the Church will actually revive, it’s not just a question of becoming dormant – it will die! It’s so serious!
I’ve taught many times on Joel 2, the former and the latter rain which fall in Israel when the seed has first been sown, and again immediately before harvest. The former rain is what happened in Act 2 on the Day of Pentecost, and I do believe in a second outpouring, a second revival – which we have been experiencing, certainly since the beginning of the 1900s. The most famous was the Welsh Revival in 1904, when my father was converted – so much of what I have today came from that.
There have been revivals at many different periods in the history of the Church. One that interests me very much is what happened in Russia. Before communism, Orthodox Russia was considered to be one of the most spiritual countries in the world. Even so, under the Czars there was a persecution of the Protestant and Evangelical Churches. But when the Communist Revolution came in 1917, followed as it was by years of mass slaughters, the early Marxists were so concerned about dominating and controlling the people, that at first this took the pressure off the Church, and so, when in 1920, a Pentecostal revival began, it spread unchecked for some years, before the persecution began again in earnest.
What happened under communism is that they replaced all Christian belief – Orthodox, Catholic, Evangelical, Pentecostal – with Marxism, turning it into a form of pseudo-religion. But in order to generate this new ‘belief’ in Marxism, they had to destroy Christianity. The result was very, very serious, and happened everywhere where communism went. But finally, history records that in 1988 Gorbachev, then leader of the Soviet Union, who was introducing new freedoms (glasnost and perestroika), allowed and promoted a state-wide celebration of the one thousand years since Christianity was first established in Russia via Kiev! I had been working in these communist countries since 1961, and now I saw it happening – a spiritual awakening! I was part of it. And it’s still there.
Now look at France. The terrible thing in France is that, in the 1789 French Revolution, they also tried to destroy all religion, atheism became the religion of the country, and France became for all time the birthplace of modern secularism. In fact it was the blueprint for communism! Yes, from Napoleon and for most of the 19th century, France was again officially a Catholic country, but in 1905 a landmark law was passed, establishing the separation of Church and State. To this day France is officially an atheistic, secular country above all else. Yes, Christianity has survived, as it does under the most terrible of persecutions, as we know in Russia. But many years ago now, President Chirac of France, a great proponent of national secularism, spoke of his fear that atheism in France had created a ‘dry riverbed of secularism which could attract a floodtide of militant religion’. That was so prophetic, that’s what is actually happening in France at this very time.
So you understand, we do need a spiritual re-awakening! Pentecost was the descent of the Holy Spirit. But even some Christian groups are reluctant to recognise Pentecost and its importance today. In my early years, and when I was a young pastor, the Pentecostal experience was not so well accepted as it was to become later. The significant sign of the arrival of the Holy Spirit was and is speaking in tongues – and a very strong move of evangelism.
We all know what happened on that first Day of Pentecost, but let’s look in Acts 4 where I see some tremendous things. It’s amazing what I read in verse 13: When the religious council in Jerusalem saw the boldness of Peter and John, they took note that they were unlearned and ignorant men, and marvelled at them, because they could see that what marked Peter and John was that they had been with Jesus!
One of the purposes for which Jesus sent the Holy Spirit at Pentecost was very simply this: He said to His disciples, “Look, I’m going to go, I won’t remain with you, I won’t be able to deal with all the issues that you have…” Remember how He’d had to rebuke His disciples and say, “How long shall I put up with you, how long will I be with you”? He said this because He knew that His ministry with them was only for a short time, but, He said, “If I go, I will send the Comforter” – that’s the Holy Spirit, who was to be with them, to replace the very Person of Jesus Christ.
So when the religious leaders saw the healing of the crippled man at the Temple Gate, they saw that Peter and John had a boldness that did not come from any learning or education or from religion – but was a personal relationship with Jesus, so that they exclaimed, “These men have been with Jesus!”
But it wasn’t just that they had been with Jesus, now the risen Jesus was with them through the Person of the Holy Spirit. Look at Acts 4:29-31, where Peter and John lift up their voices to God and say, “Lord, behold their threatenings and grant that, with all boldness, we may speak Your Word, by stretching forth Your Hand to heal, and that signs and wonders may be done in the Name of Your Holy Child Jesus!” When they had prayed, the whole place where they were gathered together was shaken, and everyone there was filled with the Holy Spirit! And as a result, they began to speak the Word of God with boldness! Just as they had asked! And verse 33 says that with GREAT POWER the apostles gave witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and the grace of God was MIGHTY on them all!
So you can see here the impact of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, that was attested by speaking in tongues and by healing. The more I read those early parts of the Acts of the Apostles, two signs of the Presence of the Holy Spirit become evident again and again: one, they spoke in tongues, and two, miracles of healing confirmed the Word they preached everywhere they went. Those two things ONLY came as a result of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit!
So you can see that what we need today is a reviving of the Church. We need to see the reviving of the Power and the manifestation of God! And we need to see the same evidences that were present in the early Church: the speaking in tongues and the miracles of healing that followed the apostles after they had received the Holy Spirit. The prophet in Habakkuk 3:2 puts this quite bluntly, “REVIVE Your Work O Lord!” This is the cry that should come from us at this very time, “Lord, REVIVE Your Work!” When God revives, He revives His Work – in us!
One powerful symbol of the Holy Spirit is FIRE! On the Day of Pentecost, there was a rushing wind and flames of fire came on them all. But look back at Elijah, when he met with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. He challenged them – and there are ‘prophets of Baal’ surrounding us today – and Elijah simply said, “The God that answers by FIRE – He is the true God!” 1 Kings 18:21. You know the story, how the prophets of Baal called on their gods, and Elijah mocked them saying, “Your god is either asleep, or gone hunting, because he doesn’t answer you!” Then when the time came, Elijah set up the sacrifice – the bullock, the stones – and poured water on the sacrifice, so that no human effort could create the fire! But when the fire came, it could not have been ordinary fire, because the Bible says it burned up, not just the sacrifice, but the water and the stones!
In my early years in Israel, a man became a great personal friend of mine, LT Pearson, an English archaeologist. He married a Jewess and had been living in Israel since the First World War. We were on Mount Carmel when he told me he could show me the very place where he believed the Fire came down – a place where some years before he had picked up a piece of blue stone! He told me, he sent it to the British Atomic Research Station in Hartwell in England for examination, and they had declared that the stone could only have been formed by atomic power! So the inference is, that God, who after all is Power, and in control of power, had actually sent down atomic power onto that sacrifice! That’s the only way fire could have burned up the sacrifice, the wood, the water and the stone!
So you see, what we need today is FIRE to come! We often say of people who are very enthusiastic that they are ‘fiery’! Come on! We need to have some of that FIRE that came on the first Day of Pentecost! Look at Acts 4:33, ‘With GREAT POWER the Apostles witnessed to the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus!’ Look, these men were not educated, nor religious – their ONLY Power and Authority was the Holy Spirit and Jesus! We’ve got to get away from the trappings of religion – we’re surrounded by the trappings of religion – they’re worthless and meaningless. We need Jesus and the Power of the Holy Spirit. We need a renewal of this experience in the Church!
There was a time when Britain was a very Christian country. Look at the records, even right up to the time of the Second World War and long before that, but at the time of the Second World War, our key generals were Christian, read the Bible and prayed – and God honoured them. What has happened?! Unfortunately, coming into ministry in 1950, I saw the post war decline of Christianity. Just as happened in Russia, where socialistic theorising which took the place of Christian FAITH – the danger for us in Britain today, is that we are seeing a lot of moralising, a lot of social institutions and organisations rising up, a lot of concern about climate change, about cultural things, the past history of slavery – why don’t we wake up to the fact that the ONLY thing which will deliver this nation and bring us to where we ought to be is a reviving of real Christian FAITH? Which ONLY comes from a personal experience with Jesus Christ and a baptism of FIRE – which will do all the things again which they did in that early Church – a Church which was under enormous persecution following the death of Jesus!
Despite the persecution, in Acts 4:29 Peter and John prayed, “Lord, behold their threatenings, and grant to Your servants that with all boldness Your servants may speak Your Word, by stretching forth Your Hand to heal, that signs and wonders may be done, by the Name of Your Holy Child Jesus!” And when they prayed – on that praying congregation the FIRE and the POWER of God came down!
What we need, what I pray for – is a spiritual awakening that will bring back the FIRE AND THE POWER into the Church. O God, grant it in Jesus’ Name! Amen!
Because Jesus Himself asked the question, “When the Son of Man comes back, will He find FAITH on the earth?” Luke 18:8. That is a question we have to answer.